Paramecium tetraurelia is a unicellular organism belonging to the kingdom of protists. It can be found primarily in a freshwater environment and is covered in hair-like structures known as cilia. The cilia help with locomotion, allowing it to move back and forth. It also helps “carry” food to cells. Paramecium is an ideal cell to study because its swimming response changes when introduced to new stimuli. The cells are also easily observable, and its cell membrane “contains many proteins, including calcium, potassium, and sodium ion channels.” Channels in the cell membrane allow ions to pass from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration. This controls the cell membrane potentials which consequently "controls the swimming behavior" of the Paramecia. (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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Sodium chloride in physical form is a white crystalline cube. It is essential for maintaining blood pressure, absorbing and transporting nutrients, and maintaining the right fluid balance. If there is too much or too little NaCl in your body, there will be problems. (Haskins, 2016)) As a result, we decided to look at what happens when sodium chloride is introduced into the Paramecium environment. From previous experiments we found 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 is added to the Paramecium tetraurelia culture, the vector changes per second will decrease. To conduct our experiment, we needed Paramecium tetraurelia culture, NaCl, 1x Dryl's medium, pipettes, a dissecting microscope, a millimeter grid, an electrophoresis chamber, and a 50 ml/100 ml graduated cylinder. The independent variable in the experiment was sodium chloride, the dependent variable was the behavior of the cell, how many carriers change per second. The standardized variables are Paramecium tetraurelia culture, electrophoresis chamber and Dryl solution. There are two levels of treatment in this experiment. In the first level the treatment was conducted without the addition of NaCl to the Dryl solution. The second level of treatment was conducted with NaCl added to the Dryl solution. The control treatment was that NaCl was not added to the Dryl solution. We performed six replicates and a sample size of 12 samples. 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 the Dryl solution into a graduated cylinder which we then poured into the electrophoresis chamber. We placed a millimeter grid on the plane of the electrophoresis chamber 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 a paramecium while another person held the stopwatch. The person observing would tell the person with the stopwatch to start the stopwatch after focusing on a Paramecium to observe. After the stopwatch beeps,.
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