Lab Manual - eScience Labs

Lab 5: Chemistry of Life
Concepts to explore:
• Atoms
• Elements
• Compounds
• Chemical bonds
• Molecules/Macromolecules
• Energy and metabolism
Concepts to explore:
• Acids and bases
• The effects of surface area
and volume
Introducon
It is important to have a general understanding of chemistry
before you can begin to understand how living organisms manage
to reproduce, grow, move, eat, and perform a great many
more funcons. To begin understanding the myriad of reac-
Remember: Mass is the quanty of
maer an object has; weight is the
force produced by gravity acng on
the mass of an object
ons that occur within a cell, it is important to review the basics of chemistry. Recall that anything that
occupies space and has mass is called maer; all maer is made of atoms.
Atoms are made of a nucleus and two kinds of subatomic parcles: electrons (negavely charged parcles),
and protons (posively charged parcles). Elements are pure substances that are made of only
one type of atom. More than 90% of maer is composed of combinaons of just four elements: oxygen,
carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. There are over 100 elements known, each with different proper-
Figure 1: The periodic table of elements categorizes all of the known elements
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