The process of photosynthesis is present in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and is the process in which cells transform energy in the form of sunlight into chemical energy in the form of organic compounds and d gaseous oxygen. (See equation below). During photosynthesis, water is oxidized to oxygen gas and carbon dioxide is reduced to glucose. Additionally, photosynthesis is an anabolic process, or in other words, a metabolism associated with building large molecules like glucose. The photosynthesis process occurs in two stages: light reactions and the Calvin cycle. The light reactions of photosynthesis take place in the thylakoid membrane and use energy from the sun to produce ATP and NADPH2. The Calvin cycle takes place in the stroma of the chloroplast and consumes ATP and NADPH2 to reduce carbon dioxide to sugar. Light energy + 6 H2O + 6 CO2  C6H12O6 + 6 O2In this laboratory experiment, the rate of photosynthesis was measured through the use of the 'floating leaf disk technique'. The leaf discs were placed in a syringe and the O2 and CO2 present in the mesophyll layers of the leaves were removed and then replaced with sodium bicarbonate or water, causing the leaves to sink to the bottom of the container. If one determines the number of leaf discs rising to the top due to an increase in oxygen gas in the mesophyll cells, then the rate of photosynthesis can be measured because O2 is a product of photosynthesis. The first step of this experiment consisted of a feasibility study of the variance of photosynthetic activity of leaf discs in aqueous and bicarbonate solutions. After five minutes of exposure to light, all of the leaf disks in the bicarbonate solution (10 disks) had...... middle of paper ...... would have led to inaccurate measurements because the leaves n would not have been able to carry out photosynthesis and return to the surface. Additionally, air in the mesophyll layers of the leaves may not have been properly removed by the syringe, which would have allowed the leaf discs to float to the surface more easily, as the leaf would have had to perform a rate lower photosynthesis. All of these errors could have been avoided by having a partner check sections of the experiment to ensure accurate results and by repeating the experiment multiple times to account for random errors. Additionally, a future experiment will be to determine the effect that the distance between the lamp and the solution has on the rate of photosynthesis. Several experiments with a setup similar to this experiment, varying the distances between the lamp and the solution, could be used to test this..