Activities Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion. Write a short paragraph to demonstrate that you understand the difference between the processes of diffusion, osmosis and active transport. Collaborate with other students to prepare a timeline chart illustrating the sequence of discoveries in this area of research. Peter Mitchell received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968 for establishing the validity of the chemiosmotic hypothesis, Find out more about the chemiosmotic hypothesis and how it explains different aspects of cellular transport.
Students demonstrate diffusion of iodine through a plastic bag 'membrane'.
One experiment uses dialysis tubing and another uses cylinders of potato tissue to demonstrate diffusion and osmosis. These notes were developed from material supplied by Paul Parkinson.