Biological Macromolecules

The vast complexity of a single organism, including humans, is attri howevered to the intricacies found within their bio molecular contents. These contents be the rattling small, specific pieces that make up everything from the walls of our cells, the manikin of the proteins that form functional structures of the cells, or even the basic units that condition the heartiness required to fuel life.The knowledge of these biomolecules can be used to meditate food contents to allow scientists to manipulate or bring up the healthiest foods, to construe new molecules that can be compounded in life obstetrical delivery medications, or to break dis sends in our own molecules that can be corrected. These argon among some of the uses knowledge of these bio molecules could provide us. In this experiment, we are going to meditate the content of two different types of substances, a banana and some prune, to identify whether or non they contain starches, sugars, or proteins.This exper iment is a very basic test of biomolecular content where identifying agents are mixed with the substances to determine their content. Our supposition is that the banana go a centering contain both sugars and starches, but will not contain protein. This hypothesis is supported by the fruits loving taste and starch-like structure, possibly similar to a potato, which, based on prior knowledge, is know to be a starchy-food. Our hypothesis for curry is less precise. The curry was an original recipe and the ingredients were unknown.Based, however, on the taste and texture alone, in proportion with other known starchy foods, we would hypothesize that it does contain starch. Protein and sugar content, however, are unknown. Specifically, we predict that when added to a banana mixture, the starch and sugar identifiers will react, and when added to a curry mixture, starch identifier will react, but the two other identifiers will be unknown. Specifics of this prediction will be discussed i n the next section.Methods To serve this study, we first mixed controls based on known substances in order to provide a baseline comparison against our experimental data. We had three identifier solutions known to react in some way to a corresponding biomolecule, and they were pippetted spare-time activity strict guidelines (see below under Pipetting Methods. ) These identifiers were biuret, iodine, and DNSA. We tested these identifiers with solutions known to exclusively contain protein, sugar, and starch, as well as mixing them with pure water to identify what no reaction would look like.The test of controls and indicators shows that biuret identifies protein, iodine identifies starches, and DNSA identifies sugar. There are some complications, however, in that DNSA also reacted (however not as strong) with proteins. This means that in substances that biuret indicates protein content, DNSA will show a reaction, regardless of whether or not in that location is sugar in the solutio n. The sugar reaction is much greater than protein, but this could still possibly give inconclusive results in anything that contains proteins.Proteins also interact with iodine however at a much different, distinguishable way so as to be less likely to influence our qualitative results. Once our controls were created and the reactions between the biomolecules and their indicators were better understood, the next part of our method involved preparing our experimental. To do this we created three tubes of each experimental substance. We diluted banana mush with water and placed it in three tubes, and diluted the curry and did the same. We whence placed in the tube the appropriate amount of indicator solution, ascertained the results, and compared them with our controls.