4. In an experiment to determine the water potential of fresh beetroot tissue, a student cut 12 rectangular 'chips' of tissue approximately 2 mm thick, 5 mm wide and 50 mm long, taken from the middle of a large beetroot. Two chips were immersed in each of six covered Petri dishes, one containing water and the others containing solutions of sucrose of different molarity, up to a maximum of 1 mol dm-3. The lengths of the chips were then measured accurately against graph paper seen through the bottoms of the dishes. Mean percentage changes in length of the chips were then measured after six hours. a. Why was it important to use fresh beetroot tissue in this experiment? b. Why would it have been important to immerse the beetroot chips as soon as possible after they were cut?

In biochemistry, enzymes are proteins that act as biological catalysts. Catalysis is the addition of a catalyst to a chemical reaction to speed up the pace of the reaction. Catalysis can be categorized as either homogeneous or heterogeneous, depending on…

A substance that acts as a catalyst to regulate the reaction rate in the living organism's metabolic pathways without itself getting altered is an enzyme. Most of the biological reactions and metabolic pathways in the living systems are carried out by en…