Net movement of water will be to outside the cell to begin with. Remember, the plant cell wants to maintain an Isotonic environment, hence the reason for water to move out. Some solute particles will move in but, there will never be too much moving in as once the concentration gradient is equal there will be no net movement of water or solute into or out of the cell.
Wouldn't water move out of the plant cell via osmosis (because the plant cell is hypotonic to the alcohol solution) causing the plant cell to shrink?
Thanks guys. I'm a bit confused when placing plant cell inside the alcohol solution. For instance, my experiment is to place a beetroot cell inside different alcohol concentration solutions. I observe that the more concentrated the alcohol, the more pink pigment from beetroot moves out of the cell. So just repeating what you guys have mentioned, "there will be a net movement of alcohol into the cell through simple diffusion due to the lipid nature of alcohol, however, there will also be a net movement of pink pigment (anthocyanin) from the beetroot cell out side of the cell to balance the concentration gradient. Consequently, the more concentrated the alcohol solution, the more anthocyanin moves out of the cell, generating an equilibrium state." Is this explanation right?
Also, when I write down the word "hypertonic solution" to refer to the alcohol environment, by teacher said it wasn't right since this is not talking about the amount of solute, she just wants me to refer to it as "a high concentration of alcohol solution", but somehow, this still doesn't make sense to me. Is she right? Can anyone give me a more detailed explanation?
Thanks so much
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