Exploring Cell Expansion in Distilled Water

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life, and it is important to study them and their functions. Knowledge about cells, once very limited, is now fairly common. As time passes, people have continued to learn more about the tiny units of life that shape the organisms on our planet and their inner workings. One question asked about cells was about why they expand when exposed to distilled water. It could be due to macromolecules in the cell’s cytoplasm trying to move out of the cell, after distilled water is absorbed, but are blocked by the cell’s membrane and inadvertently pushing on its membrane from the inside out causing the cell to expand. Another possibility is the cell absorbs the distilled water, causing the cell to get bigger and expand. An explanation to the question asked would help to broaden them way people view cells by helping to educate on the effects of

The liquids used were distilled water, and a starch solution, in line with the guiding question. Dialysis tubing was used because it performed similarly to an actual cell while being visible to the naked eye. First, I soaked four strips of dialysis tubing in water for 5 minutes, afterwards I knotted off one of the ends for all of the tubing. After, I filled two with a half tablespoon of distilled water, and another two with half a tablespoon of the starch solution. Next I measured the lengths, widths, and weights of the cells. I proceeded to leave the four cells to soak in distilled water for about 24 hours. After leaving them in distilled water for about a day, I extracted the cells from the distilled water and remeasured the measurements mentioned before. In hindsight, this was an ideal method to investigate the guiding question because the dialysis tubing functions almost identically to a living cell while being easier to observe and handle at the