Budding Bilogists want to help me clarify soemthing? (1 Viewer)

Yindi

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Hi everyone, in bio today we had a practical exam referring to this dotpoint:

"identify data sources, plan, choose equipment or resources and perform a fi rst-hand investigation to test the effect of: change in substrate concentrations on the activity of named enzyme(s)"

This is roughly what we did:

Make different concentrations of the substrate by diluting the milk with distilled water to get different concentrations.
Add the same amount of rennin (Junket Tablets powdered and dissolved in solution) solution to the milk.

we had one with 0ml milk 10 ml water
one with 2 ml milk 8 ml water
one with 4 ml milk 6 ml water
one with 6 ml milk 4 ml water
one with 8 ml milk 2 ml water
one with 10 ml milk 0 ml water

Place in a water bath kept at a constant temp 37oC.

Time the interval between adding the rennin and curdling of the milk.


Now this is where it gets interesting:

I understand very well that increasing the concentration increases the "reaction rate" up to the concentration point, however we had no way of calculating the "reaction rate" and instead measured the total time, in seconds, it took for all the milk to coagulate (becoem solid).

Some people in my class results showed that the one with the highest concentration completely coagulatated the fastest, other showed that (including my results) that the one with the lowest concentration coagulated the fastest.

The two arguements are that:

the reaction rate is fatster in higher concentrations and therefor coagulates the fastest

or

my arguement: the one with the highest concentration had five times as much milk (10ml:2ml) to coagulate and even though it was coagulating at a faster rate takes longer to coagulate:

thanks for any help in advance.
 

mynuber

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I'm certain that your conclusion is correct. If the amount of renin was kept constant as the dotpoint suggests, assuming the saturation point is met with 10 mL and 2 mL of milk, it is safe to say that 2mL of milk undergos a faster co-agulation with its lesser as it is much less of an amount. Remember that that assumes that the saturation point is reached at the same time for all amounts.
 

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