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  • Essay / The effect of sodium chloride on the swimming behavior of paramecium

    Paramecium tetraurelia is a single-celled organism belonging to the protist kingdom. It is found primarily in a freshwater environment and is covered in hair-like structures called cilia. Cilia facilitate locomotion, allowing it to move forward and backward. It also helps “deliver” food to the cells. Paramecium is an ideal cell to study due to the fact that its swimming response changes when introduced to new stimuli. The cells are also easily observed, and their cell membrane “contains many proteins, including calcium, potassium, and sodium ion channels.” Channels in the cell membrane allow ions to move from highly concentrated areas to low concentrated areas. This controls the membrane potentials of the cells, which consequently “controls the swimming behavior” of the Paramecium. (Clarke et al., 2002) Sodium chloride, NaCl, is known as table salt. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Sodium chloride in its physical form is a white crystalline cube. It is essential for maintaining our blood pressure, absorbing and transporting nutrients, and maintaining proper fluid balance. If there is too much or too little NaCl in your body, problems will arise. (Haskins, 2016)) As a result, we decided to observe what happens when sodium chloride is introduced into the Paramecium environment. Previous experiments showed us that when Paramecia were exposed to chemicals, their swimming behavior changed. We wanted to see how NaCl, so prevalent in the environment, would affect them. The hypothesis was that if we added NaCl to the Paramecium tetraurelia culture, the vector changes per second would increase. The null hypothesis, subsequently, was that when NaCl was added to the Paramecium tetraurelia culture, the vector changes per second would decrease. To conduct our experiment, we needed a Paramecium tetraurelia culture, NaCl, 1x Dryl medium, pipettes, a dissecting microscope, a millimeter grid, an electrophoresis chamber and 'a graduated cylinder of 50 ml/100 ml. The independent variable in the experiment was sodium chloride, the dependent variable was the behavior of the cell, the number of vectors changed per second. The standardized variables are the Paramecium tetraurelia culture, the electrophoresis chamber and the Dryl solution. There are two levels of processing in this experiment. At the first level, the treatment was carried out without adding NaCl to the Dryl solution. The second level of treatment was carried out with NaCl added to the Dryl solution. The control treatment was that NaCl was not added to the Dryl solution. We had six replications and a sample size of 12 people. We started with the control treatment, which included 250 ml of Dyl solution alone. We first gathered our materials and then connected the dissecting microscope. We then collected 250 mL of Dryl solution in a graduated cylinder which we then poured into the electrophoresis chamber. We placed a millimeter grid on the electrophoresis chamber stage and poured the Paramecium culture into the solution. After waiting 1 minute, to allow the Paramecium to get used to the environment, we then took turns observing the Paramecium. Each person looked through the microscope and focused on one paramecium while another person held the stopwatch. The person observing said to,.