PRACTICAL Name:

15 Transport tissue in plants

You need:
■ microscopes ■ celery ■ Petri dishes
■ slides and coverslips ■ germinated broad beans ■ paint brushes
■ razors ■ white tiles ■ eosin dye

Water-conducting tissue of celery Celery

1 Obtain a stick of celery, preferably with leaves still attached. Put
it in a beaker half-filled with eosin dye and leave it for 24 hours.
Razor blade
2 Look carefully at the leaf veins. Observe and describe what has
happened. Explain what has happened.
3 Lay the celery on a white tile and use a razor to cut thin slices off
it. Continue until you have a slice so thin it is almost transparent. White tile
4 Use a paint brush to transfer the slice to a microscope slide, add
a drop of water and lower a coverslip over it.
5 Make a drawing of the slide showing which areas have turned
red. What are these areas? Refer to page 77 of the text book.

Compare root and stem of beans

1 Germinate a number of broad bean seeds by trapping them
against the sides of a jam jar with a cylinder of blotting paper
filled with damp sand or sawdust. Leave them until the root and
stem have developed.
Broad bean
2 Clamp a bean over a beaker of eosin so that its root is immersed
in the dye. Leave it until the dye becomes visible in the leaf veins.
3 Cut thin slices of the root and stem, and make drawings to show
which areas have been stained red.
What is the difference between the position of xylem in a bean
stem and root?

Your teacher will be looking for:

HAZARD WARNING
■ careful use of the apparatus given
■ good observation Razor blades are sharp,
■ good presentation of results as diagrams handle with care.

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