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Digestive fluid

  • Thread starter Mordan
  • Start date
hi, i'm mordan

im doing an sience experiment on picherplants for school about the digestion of carnivorousplants and would really like to have some information about this subject.
I am also not so verry sure about by experiment, we wanted to isolate some of it's digestive fluid on the bottom of the 'tubes' of the plant, i only just don't know how......

thx
 
Do you have a plant that you are going to use for the experiment? If so, I would recommend putting a swab of cotton in the mouth of the pitcher just as it opens. This will prevent it from eating anything and thus contaminating the juice. Let it stand a few days, and keep the plan nice & wet. You may be able to poor out some of the fluid.

I don't actually know if sars keep a resevoir in their pitchers like neps do, though. If they don't, this won't work. Something in the back of my brain is telling me that the movement of prey is what stimulates the secretion of the fluid.

Hopefully someone else will jump in here....
 
Assuming he's going to analyse it for proteases, why not just collect the bilge from a full pitcher, and see if digestive enzymes show up in that.

And, as a control, drown some bugs in water and let it stand for a couple of weeks, and compare that to the pitcher fluid.
 
"Insects that encounter the purple pitcher plant, S. purpurea, drown in collected rainwater, where they slowly decompose by bacterial action and weak enzymes. All of the other species trap their prey in tubular leaves, near the bottom of which digestive acids and enzymes are produced and secreted more heavily as more insects are caught. Micro-organisms also play a part in digestion."
-Peter D'amato, The Savage Garden, p. 74, regarding Sarracenias
 
hi there,

thx for the info. there is little to no fluid in my sep. i also have a venus so i thought of an another experiment:
there is an verry little amount of fluid needed to measure the ph level, so i can see wheter it is acidic.
Next to that i am going to put some fat in it. If the plant digests fat it would mean there is something like lipase. I'm also take some albumen and feed it to the sep. depending on the product i will indicate an pep- enzyme. maybe i can also feed it some starch or so.

i'm verry exited about this project and what i'll find
smile.gif


write you later

kamiel
 
you could stimulate the pitchers with a probe or something a couple times a day to trick them. or maybe put them in a terrarium with a fan blowing on them to shake them gently.

you might want to try several genera.
 
Isn't school almost out for the summer?

First you need to run a Google search and see what others have already done. That should give you a better idea of what has been done. Maybe even replicate a previous experiment.

Sarracenia purpurea pitchers hold fluid and nepenthes also.

Not sure about using the "fat" thing. There are different types of fat. Run a search on the enzymes of sarracenia, etc. - they may not can break down complex fats.

Isolate the control group so no insects can enter the pitchers. This can be done by blocking the pitcher opening with cotton. Use different insects in the others. Maybe crush some bugs and not crush some in other pitchers. You will need multiple plants for both groups.

Isolating chemical compounds from plants is a bit complex. Maybe just run an experiment on pitcher plants with insects and another group without insects and plot which ones grow better.

Good Luck,
Tweek
 
There won't be any fluid in empty, blocked pitchers. To collect anything you will need to let it catch some insects and then slit open the pitcher, as the acid will be below the level of insects and hard to get to from above.

There will be no lipase, but mostly protease. Chitonase is apparenly present in small quantities.

The plant absorbs nitrogen and phosphorus, but not calcim, magnesium or potassium
 
There was a good paper printed in The Journal of Plant Physiology where they followed the expression of enzymes in Sarracenia purpurea. The title for the article is "Signal Transduction in the carnivorous plant, Sarracenia purpurea.

As soon as the pitchers opened up, they filled them with sterile water containing several antibiotics in order to prevent bacterial contamination from giving a false enzyme reading.  They enzymes they looked for were DNase, RNase, protease, phosphatase and chitinase.  All were present except chitinase.  

Even though the newly opened pitchers contained only sterile water, they began to secrete enzymes.  Without the addition of nutrients to the fluid, enzyme levels decreased.  Old, inactive pitchers could respond to the presence of nutrients and begin to secrete enzymes again.  In order to test this, they added either BSA protein, DNA, RNA, or various ionic solutes (such as reduced nitrogen), to the pitcher fluid.  The article outlines the various methods that they used to test for enzyme activity.  

Brian
 
  • #10
Noce!
biggrin.gif

thx for helping me out
 
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