Today is the Science Fair

Our big day, the day of the Horn Elementary Science Fair is here.  Our experiment gave us real data.

As you remember, maybe, different compounds were mixed into 800 mls of water. We found that 1 tablespoon of salt or sugar, or two crushed aspirin, in the water prevented our arabidopsis seeds from sprouting. Great! What was really interesting was that very low concentration of salt (1/8 teaspoon in 800mls)  gave us more spouted seeds.

We did not get a chance to try to reproduce our experiment before the day of the fair. But reproducibility will have to be a lesson for another day.

We made a graph of our germination data.

One Fun Mutant

sThe best part of our experiments had to  be the mutant we grew to adulthood. Our plants were under stress because we were new to this and made some mistakes. The challenging conditions, however, made it obvious that the mutant strains we were trying to grow were weaker than the wild type. Most of them died. One did survive though; and it was really weird. 

We were lucky that out of five possible mutants the bp-1 mutant grew to adulthood. It was obviously strange, throwing off stunted flowers from the stem every which way. (See all of the random flowers sprouting off of the stem in the photo?) It also had downward pointing buds and was rather puny, overall.

We summed all of this up in our poster, which we will present tonight at the science fair.