Spinacia Oleracea Synthesis Lab Report

Discussion: Spinacia oleracea like many other plants contains leaves which play a crucial role in the process of photosynthesis. The energy used to drive the chemical reactions within photosynthesis comes from the sunlight absorbed by the chlorophyll molecules (Merzlyak, Chivkunova, Zhigalova, & Naqvi 2009). These chlorophyll molecules then transfer the light energy to chloroplasts and that light energy is converted into chemical energy (Merzlyak, Chivkunova, Zhigalova, & Naqvi 2009). The purpose of this experiment was to observe what the absorbance spectrum of Spinacia oleracea extract was and what the absorbance spectrum of the pigments were within the extract. From the use of the spectrophotometer I was able record the absorption spectrum of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, carotene, and xanthophyll to determine the range of wavelengths of light absorbed by the molecules. It was predicted within the Spinacia oleracea extract, chlorophyll a and …show more content…
Results show a significant difference between the correspond absorbance and wavelength recordings of the four pigments. Carotene and Xanthophyll absorb the least amount of range within the wavelengths starting at 400 nm and going to 500 nm peaking between an absorption of 0.2 and 0.6. Meaning that Carotene and Xanthophyll only have a range of 100 nm. Chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b absorb the largest range of wavelengths; starting at 400 nm and going to 500 nm. The absorbance then peaks again between 600 nm and 700 nm. The range of wavelengths between chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b encompassing a range of roughly 200 nm. The comparison being that the range of chlorophyll a and b combined had 100 more nm encompassed within the wavelengths than that of xanthophyll and carotene