Study Guide for Biology 1110 Laboratory Practical One

Exercise 1- Orientation

1. Know the steps you should take to prepare for each week's laboratory exercise.
2. Understand the structure of biological terminology.  Be able to combine prefixes, suffixes and root words from appendix A to
create terms.
3. What is length, mass, volume, and temperature?
4. What are the metric reference units for length, volume, mass  and temperature?
5. Be able to convert from one metric unit to another.
6. Be able to convert from degrees F to degrees C (when provided with the conversion formula).
7. Be able to identify and use a graduated cylinder, beakers, pipettes, a triple beam balance, and a metric ruler.
8. What is a meniscis?
9. What is a dichotomous key?
10. Be able to identify in an experiment the hypothesis, the controls, the independent or experimental variable, and the
 dependent variable (results).

Exercise 4 - Chemical Aspects

1. Be able to calculate the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons of common biological elements using a periodic table.
2. What are ionic bonds, and covalent bonds?
3. Be able to define: acid, base, and buffer.
4. What is the pH scale?
5. Be able to use pH paper to determine the pH of common substances.
6. What is bromthymol blue?
7. Know the basic premise of the 5 tests performed for organic compounds, and be able to identify a positive reaction.
 

Organic Compound	TEST	POSITIVE REACTION
Simple Carbohydrates (glucose)	Benedict's	Yellow/orange/red
Complex Carbohydrateds (starch)	Iodine	Blue/black
Lipids	Paper Spot	Translucent spot
Lipids	Sudan IV	Red droplets on top
Proteins	Biuret	Pale Violet

  8.  Be able to give examples and characteristics of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins.

Exercise 6- Enzymes

1. What is an enzyme? substrate? active site? product?
2. In class, for our model experiments, what served as the enzyme?  What was the substrate?  What was the product?
3. How could you tell if the products (water and oxygen) had been produced?
4. How did temperature affect catalase activity?
5. How did pH affect catalase activity?
6. Given a series of tubes, be able to identify the tubes with the highest catalase activity and the least catalase activity.
7. Which cells contain more catalase? Apples, potato, steak, liver?  Why?
8. What does it mean to denature an enzyme?

Exercise 5 Diffusion and Osmosis

1. Be able to define the following terms: solute, solvent, diffusion, osmosis, isotonic, hypertonic, hypotonic.
2. What is Brownian movement?  Be able to identify.
3. What effect does molecular weight of a solute have on rate of diffusion?  Be able to describe the experiment to test this.
4. What effect does temperature have on rate of diffusion? Be able to describe the experiment to test this.
5. What is a semipermeable membrane?
6. Is dialysis or cellulose tubing permeable to glucose? To starch?  To iodine? How do you know?
7. Does the magnitude of the solute concentration gradient affect the rate of osmosis?  Describe the experiment to test this.
8. What happens to celery in salt water?
9. Be able to identify Elodea cells in hypertonic and hypotonic solutions.
10. How and why do plant cells respond differently than animal cells to hypotonic solutions?
11. Know the parts of, and how to use the binocular light microscope.

Exercise 3- The Cell

1.  Know differences in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
2. Be able to differentiate prokaryotic from eukaryotic cells when observing under the microscope.
3. Be able to identify the 3 shapes (we observed) of prokaryotic cells.
4. Be able to identify Anabaena.
5. Be able to identify cheek cells, onion cells, Amoeba, and Elodea under the microscope.  Also be able to locate the cell membrane,
nucleus, chloroplast, central vacuoles, cytoplasm, and cell walls (if present).
6. Know differences in plant and animals cells.
7. From an illustration or a cell model, be able to identify major parts of the Eukaryotic cell.

Exercise 7- Photosynthesis

1. Know the overall formula for photosynthesis.
2. Is carbon dioxide necessary for photosynthesis to occur?  Be able to describe the experiment to test this.
3. Is light necessary for photosynthesis to occur?  Be able to describe the experiment to test this.
4. Are chloroplast pigments necessary for photosynthesis to occur?  Be able to describe the experiment to test this.
5. What is a common test for the presence of starch?  Why does the presence of starch reflect photosynthetic activity?
6. Why do you have to boil the leaf before testing for starch?
7. What is chromatography?
8. What is meant by the visible light spectrum?
9. Be able to identify pigments on a strip of chromatography paper based on their location and appearance.