Christy Wong 10.

3
Biology L!B Report
Stage 1-Planning

Title:
Is it colliding?

Introduction:
Catalase is an enzyme which is present in potatoes, and when it is reacted with the substrate -
hydrogen peroxide, it forms a product which is oxygen. Scientically, the enzymes present in the
reaction would react with the substrate, and whenever there is a successful collision, then will it allow
oxygen to be produced. Therefore, if there are no successful collision, the enzymes would not be
reacting with the substrate, hence nothing being created. There are many factors that could affect the
dependent variable in this experiment which is either the volume of oxygen being produced or the
time of reaction. These following are the listed factors:

- Temperature of the hydrogen peroxide (substrate)
- Mass of the potato
- Surface area of the potato
- Concentration of hydrogen peroxide (substrate)

In this experiment, I have chosen to investigate how the surface area of potatoes would affect the
volume of oxygen produced in this experiment.

Aim:
The aim of this experiment is to nd out how the surface area of the potato pieces would affect the
volume of oxygen produced in milliliters.

Variables:
Independent Variable: Surface area of potato pieces
Dependent Variable: Volume of oxygen produced
Controlled Variable/Fair testing: Look at the table below

Controlled
Variable
Why will I need to control it? How will I control it?
Amount of
hydrogen peroxide
We need to control this because different
amount of hydrogen can cause less, or more
reaction happening to the catalase during the
experiment, hence we must stick to the same
volume of hydrogen peroxide for each
experiment and trial
I will control this by using a 10 ml measuring
cylinder to measure out 10 ml of hydrogen
peroxide and then pouring it into the side arm
tube making sure that it is the same throughout
the whole experiment.
Temperature of the
hydrogen peroxide
We need to control this because the
temperature of the hydrogen peroxide can
cause different can cause different reaction
rates, as high temperature might cause it to
denature, or low temperature might cause the
reaction and the enzymes to move much more
slower
I will control this by using a thermometer and
trying the temperature of the hydrogen peroxide
and make sure it is at a room temperature of
about 20C so that it wouldnt affect the rate of
reaction in some experiments
Diameter of each
piece of potato
We need to control this because it mainly would
affect our x axis as this then contributes to the
surface area of each potato piece.
I will control this by using the same sized cork
borer to puncture the holes in the potato
creating the stripes of potato, hence in each
potato, it would be the same diameter, not
bigger or smaller.
Christy Wong 10.3

Hypothesis:
I think that in this experiment, the bigger the surface area, the higher the volume for oxygen collected.
This is due to the fact that catalase is present in the potato, however, when there is more surface area
of potato, this also means that there is more exposure to the catalase (enzymes) to the substrate
which is the hydrogen peroxide. Hence with this in mind, there is more active site in the reaction,
which is the reason why the substrate can have a higher probability of a successful collision, meaning
that there would be more product produced. And the product produced in this chemical reaction is
oxygen, hence I think that the when there is a lot of slices of potato (large surface area), there would
be a higher volume of oxygen produced in the reaction.

Apparatus:

Cork Borer

1 10ml Measuring Cylinder

1 50 ml Measuring Cylinder

Safety Glasses

Stopwatch

Knife

Cutting Board

Trough

120 Hydrogen Peroxide in total (3% Concentration)

3 potatoes

Side arm tube

Delivery Tube

Ruler

Stopper

Side arm metal stand

Spatula

Thermometer




The width of each
potato
We need to control this because it would affect
our equation when we are calculating the
surface area as the width of each potato
contributes as the h in the equation.
I will control this by using a ruler when cutting
the pieces of the potato, hence we can know
where to cut each slices of potato with the
width of 0.1 cm, hence when it comes to
calculating the surface area for all, it would be
controlled.
Time for the
reaction
We need to control this because we would be
collecting different volumes of oxygen if we
dont control the time for each experiment and
also because we might not know how long it
would react for, hence timing it can save time
and allow us to do it for more times and
allowing the data to be more accurate.
I will control this by using a stopwatch and
making sure that all my experiments and the
trials only go for 3 minutes and hoping that
there would be reaction occurring during that 3
minutes. After reaching 3 minutes, we would
immediately look at the 50 ml measuring
cylinder in the water and record the data.
Concentration and
pH of the substrate
We need to control this because different pH
and the concentration because different levels
of pH might cause the enzymes to react
differently either allowing a higher rate of
successful collision or lowering the rate.
I will control this by using the same hydrogen
peroxide every time, which is using the one with
the concentration of 3% throughout the whole
experiment meaning that it wont affect the rate
of successful collisions.
Controlled
Variable
Why will I need to control it? How will I control it?
Christy Wong 10.3
Method:

Experiment:
1. Acquire all the apparatus listed above
2. Fill up the trough with water
3. Set up the side arm metal stand, and place the side arm tube next to the trough
4. Insert the delivery tube which connects the side arm tube to the trough of water which would be
later inserted into the measuring cylinder
5. Use the 50 ml measuring cylinder and place it in the trough of water, ll it up by tilting it upwards.
*make sure that the cylinder is lled with water, and no gas is visible*
6. After the measuring cylinder is full, carefully place the delivery tube into the cylinder
7. Measure out 10ml of hydrogen peroxide with the 10 ml measuring cylinder
8. Pour that out into the side arm tube
9. Now, take your cork borer and use the largest size possible in the collection and puncture a hole
into the potato.
10.Then use the next biggest size cork borer, to slide the piece of potato out
11.Using a ruler, measure out 2 cm from that piece of potato
12.Cut the piece of potato in slices, making it 0.1 cm per slice hence allowing it to have 20 slices from
the 2cm potato piece
13.Place these potato pieces onto the spatula
14.Carefully, place the potato into the side arm tube *make sure the stopper is right beside you so it does
not affect the time of reaction*
15.Right after the potato pieces have been placed, quickly use the stopper and cover the side arm
tube *Remember to have your partner to press the stopwatch right when the potato pieces goes into
contact with the hydrogen peroxide as it would have started reacting*
16.Have the stopwatch go for 3 minutes, and once 3 minutes is up, check the volume of oxygen
produced in the reaction
17.Record your data in the book.
18.Repeat steps 5 to 17 for two more times for more reliable results. *Remember to wash out the potato
slices in the side arm, hence taking out the side arm, washing it and also the 50 ml cylinder as you need to
pour the water away to restart another trial/experiment*
19.After that, redo steps 5 to 18 with different lengths of potato (4,6,8) which is potentially increasing
surface area, meaning that in each round there would be different amounts of potato pieces
(40,60,80)

Calculating Surface Area:
Diagram:
Christy Wong 10.3

1. Use the equation: 2!r^2 + 2!rh (r = radius, h = width of potato piece)
2. Substitute all the numbers in, meaning r would be 0.5 as diameter of the each potato piece was 1,
and then the width (h) of each potato piece is 0.1 hence completing this equation
3. The number calculated would be the surface of each single piece meaning that it would be
different for different lengths.
4. Hence for 2cm long potato, we would multiply the surface area of each single piece which is (1.88)
and multiply it by 20 pieces as 2/0.1 is 20. Same logic is applied to the potato pieces with different
lengths (4,6,8)
5. After calculating, you would have found all the surface area for each length, that is the new x axis
numbers.


Measurements:











Stage 2- Data Collection
What I need to measure? How will I measure it?
Amount of hydrogen peroxide (10ml) I will measure this by using a 10 ml measuring
cylinder to measure the amount of hydrogen
peroxide which is needed in the experiment
Temperature of hydrogen peroxide I will measure this by using a thermometer to
make sure that is kept around 20 degrees
Celsius and it would not affect my data
collection.
Volume of oxygen produced during the reaction I will measure this by using a measuring cylinder
when placing it in the trough of water, and
hence I can measure it in ml and gure out the
amount of volume produced in the reaction
Length of potato, diameter of potato I will measure this by using a ruler and checking
the length of the potato piece which would
increase by 2 (2,4,6,8), and for the diameter I
would use the ruler and measure the diameter of
the cork borer hence knowing the diameter of
the potato.
Surface area of each length of potato (2,4,6,8) I would measure the surface area of the potato
by using the diameter of the potato, and then
the width and then substituting into this
equation: 2!r^2 + 2!rh
Christy Wong 10.3
Raw Data:
















Stage 3 - Data Processing



V
o
l
u
m
e

o
f

o
x
y
g
e
n

p
r
o
d
u
c
e
d

(
m
l
)
0
5
10
14
19
24
Total Surface area of potato input (cm squared)
0 32 64 96 128 160
The relationship between the surface area of potato piece
and the volume of oxygen produced in the reaction
Oxygen Produced (ml)
Surface Area
(cm
Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 3 Average
38 7 8 7 7
75 16 18 17 17
113 20 20 22 21
151 24 23 26 24
I have rounded up to 1 decimal places in this table due to the fact that I have considered if we give 2 decimal
places to the average volume of oxygen produced, it doesnt really do much difference to the volume of
oxygen, hence we got rid of the decimal place and rounded it to 1. Same applied to the surface area as 0.1
cm squared would not create much difference towards the data.
From looking at the graph, I can see a rise of volume of oxygen produced due to the increase of the total
surface area, hence from this, you can see a relationship between the surface area of potato pieces and the
volume of oxygen produced. Which means that the larger the surface area, the more oxygen would be
produced due to higher rate of successful collisions.
Christy Wong 10.3
Stage 4 - Conclusion

Through this experiment, I have found that there is a relationship between the surface area of the potato
pieces and the volume of oxygen produced in the experiment. From my graph and data, it shows that the
larger the surface area, the more oxygen is produced, hence there is a rise in my graph. This does support
my hypothesis which I have predicted earlier, as it has been proven with my graph shown above. I do think
that my data was reliable due to the fact that from judging from our graph, the points are all really close to
the line of best t, and shows that my points plotted are pretty much accurate, however there were some
errors that occurred, but it caused only minor changes, overall the plotted points do correlate with the
scientic reasoning. The reason behind why the larger the surface area it gets, the more oxygen has been
produced is due to the fact that if there is more enzymes exposed to the substrate which is catalase in
potato and the hydrogen peroxide, it increases the chance of it undergoing a chemical reaction. This is all
because of successful collisions, if there is more enzymes, it means that there are more active sites for the
substrate to create a enzyme-substrate complex, therefore, more oxygen could be produced as there are
many reactions happening. Hence, when there is a low surface area of potato pieces, this means that there
is less exposure to the enzymes in the substate, furthermore meaning that there is less active site for the
substrate to combine with, so that there is less product being formed in the process.

The rate of successful collision increases when surface area increases, however to a certain point it would
stop increasing and stay at a straight line, which is also a reason why I have plotted a curved line of best t.
This is due to the fact that we have kept the substrate constant throughout the whole experiment, and
increasing the surface area all the way through. Even if there is a large amount of enzymes, the substrate is
still limited to a certain amount, meaning that once the substrate have already fully reacted with the active
site, there would be no more substrate left, hence even if there is a lot of enzymes, the oxygen produced
will still remain the same after the maximum successful collision rate has been reached. Therefore I have
chosen a curved graph, because the rate would increase in a curve however after a while of constant
increase of enzymes it would arrive at a plateau because there isnt enough substrate to fully react with the
enzymes exposed in the reaction.

Lastly to sum up, the larger surface area the potato has means that there is more exposure of catalase to
the substrate hydrogen peroxide meaning that there is a lot of active site for the substrate to combine with.
Furthermore showing that higher volume of oxygen could be produced in the reaction as the surface area
increases. However, up to a point where the ratio of substrate and amount of enzymes is totally unequal is
when the amount of oxygen would stay the same even if you add more surface area every time. There
would be a point of the graph where it suddenly turns into a straight line as there isnt enough substrate to
bind with the catalase, hence even if you having a larger surface area than the maximum one, it would
create no difference, because the substrate has already been fully used and it can not undergo the
chemical reaction again, also known as collision between the enzymes and substrate.

















Christy Wong 10.3
Stage 5 - Evaluation





Error How this affected the results? Improvement
Placing the potato pieces in the
side arm tube, not all at the same
time
When we place the potato piece into the
side am tube, we didnt place all of it at
the same exact time due to the fact that
we had a lot of pieces so we had to put it
in the spatula, however as the length of
potato increased, we had a lot more
difculty in putting it in because we need
to use more than 1 spatula. Which means
that one spoonful of potato reaches the
hydrogen peroxide before the other
spoon, this would have meant that maybe
the potato pieces already had reacted
with the hydrogen peroxide before we put
in the 2
nd
that it might have already produced
oxygen and it would have leaked through
the top of the tube as we havent added
the stopper on to the tube yet. This could
have affected the results because it
meant that we didnt collect all of the
oxygen we should have during the
experiment. This could have cause the
data to have lower reliability as the potato
placed at rst could have already reacted
way earlier but the gas (oxygen) was lost
because the stop havent placed. With
this in mind, the trend line of the graph
could have been different.
I can improve this error by changing the
way we are placing the potato pieces in
the tube. Maybe we could have 2 people
at the same time placing the potatoes in,
hence we can make sure the time
difference between the rst spatula and
the second would be less, hence maybe
the time would not affect it too much as it
might not have thoroughly reacted it. With
this, we can allow a higher reliability in
our results because we are placing the
potato pieces into the tube as fast as we
can, hence the time wasted would be
less, and all the potato pieces can react
at the same time together and hoping
that oxygen does not immediately get lost
into the surrounding.
Cutting up the slices of the
potato slices in the width of 0.1
cm
Through the whole experiment, we
needed to chop up the potato pieces so
that each width of every slice was 0.1, it
was pretty hard to be exact even if we
had a ruler with us because cutting into
such small slice was very difcult.
Therefore, some pieces could be thicker
than others, which would have potentially
mean that there is less surface area in the
experiment. This could have affected the
results because this means that there
were less exposure of enzymes
(catalase) towards the substrate, which
shows that there might be less oxygen
produced throughout the experiment.
This could explain why the data collected
between the length of potato 4,6,8 cm
was pretty much close to each other.
Since it was harder to cut more pieces of
potatoes in 0.1 cm, and there could be
the loss of enzymes through some
inconsistency of cutting the potato. This
error could have affected our reliability of
the data because we werent consistent
with each potato piece and cause it to
have different surface area, also the
enzymes present on the surface.
To improve, we could have increased the
width of each potato, meaning that
instead of using 0.1 we could have made
it 1 or 2 cm wide so that it could be more
accurate and a lot easier for us to do.
This is because if we used 0.1, it would
have affected the surface area if it wasnt
perfectly chopped at the 0.1 point,
therefore if we increased the width, we
could have even more accurate ndings
as we are making the cutting way more
easier for ourselves to be exact.
Christy Wong 10.3
If I could do this experiment again, I would chose to investigate on the temperature of the hydrogen
peroxide and how that affects the rate of the successful collisions and whether that would affect the the
volume of oxygen being produced. This is because the temperature might cause the enzymes to work at a
faster rate, or at a slower rate and it is worth nding out.








Putting the stopper on the side
arm tube and the control of
stopwatch
After frantically placing the potatoes into
the side arm tube, we quickly placed the
stopper and covered the tube as hard as
we could. After that we pressed the
stopwatch. Well, logically, the potato
pieces would have already reacted with
the substrate once it had contact, hence
we didnt know when to actually press the
stopwatch. After a piece of potato came
in contact with the substrate, or after we
have placed the stopper on top of the
tube? We didnt really know, hence we
kind of juggled between these 2
decisions throughout the whole
experiment. This could have caused
inaccuracy to the data as we werent
consistent about when to press the
stopwatch and it could have affected the
volume of oxygen produced during the
experiment as some trials might have
had more time than others. This could
have affected the reliability of our results
because we had different concepts of
when to press the stopwatch, and if we
did it before all potatoes were placed,
some oxygen might have been lost
hence causing some inaccuracy to our
results.
To improve, I think that we should have all
started to a agreement - when we should
have pressed the stopwatch and thought
about it logically, whether it would really
matter for that few seconds for the potato
to react rst before applying the stopper,
or those seconds really mattered and
would have drastically impacted our
results, and we should have pressed our
stopwatches once the potato came into
contact with the substrate. I think to
actually improve in this aspect is to have
better critical thinking because we should
judge between the 2 decisions and see
which one is actually more important or
whether it really matters towards the
actual data as a whole and the nal
product of the graph.