EXPERIMENT GUIDES
Pick one. Book a bench. Run it.
Full protocols with apparatus lists, step-by-step technique, safety notes, and the results you should expect — so you know when you've nailed it.
5 of 19 experiments
Food tests: starch, sugars, protein and fat
Four classic bench tests — iodine, Benedict's, biuret and the emulsion test — run on real food samples to detect the major nutrients.
Microscopy: onion epidermal cells
Prepare a wet mount of onion epidermis, stain it with iodine, and draw what you actually see at ×40 and ×400 — cell walls, nuclei and all.
Dye uptake in celery: does warmer water speed up the xylem stream?
Stand a dyed celery stalk in ice-cold water and its twin in warm water, then cut both into 5 mm cross-sections to see how far the dye actually travelled — and why warmth wins.
Iodine clock: estimating hydrogen peroxide concentration by serial dilution
Serially dilute a 2.0% hydrogen peroxide stock by half, four times, then time how long each dilution takes to turn a starch–iodide–thiosulfate mixture blue-black. Use the same timing method on an unknown 'patient sample' to estimate its hydrogen peroxide concentration by interpolation.
Microscopy and stereology: a plant stem cross-section (slide J1)
A fixed, confidential, pre-mounted stem section — not one you prepare yourself. Draw a large low-power plan (labelling the xylem) and a high-power group of four epidermal cells (labelling the waxy cuticle), compare the slide against a printed photomicrograph of a different stem, then use a sector count and a known angle to estimate the section's vascular-bundle density.