| Explore | Outside of school we know things like how plants reproduce and different kinds of trees. Not a ton! But in school we've learned about different flowering plants and trees. Including plants like angiosperms and gymnosperms. We also just learned about potato soft rot which is pretty gross. Some questions: How long does an average tree take to reach maturity? How do aquatic plants survive underwater? How can you tell which plants are safe to eat? Questions on potato soft rot: Why does it smell so bad? Why do potatoes get bacteria? Why was it so mushy? How come the dark spots didn't spread more? |
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| Research Question | Will potato soft rot affect another vegetable like carrots? Will the carrots suffer the same symptoms as the potatoes? We want to see if the soft rot is exclusive to potatoes or not? These questions fit because we are further digging into the information about potato soft rot that we have already learned. |
| Predictions | What we think will happen is the carrots will get mushy and turn a dark brown color. We also think it might smell like the potato, and also have some of the same symptoms. We think this will happen to the carrots because if it happened to potatoes, it can pretty much happen to any food. |
| Experimental Design | Our plan is to replicate the soft rot experiment on three carrots. What we need: 4 carrots, 2 potatoes, inoculation, bags for the produce, wet paper towels, toothpicks, gloves, tray, goggles, knife First we will inoculate one potato and 3 carrots leaving another potato and carrot to observe what a normal one would look like. Then we will wrap the vegetables in wet paper towels (putting the carrots and potato separately). Then we will wait for the inoculation to take place and finally observe our findings. We are testing the carrots to see if they will become affected. We are keeping the type of carrot and setting the same. We plan to record our data in a notebook. |
| Conclusion | Final Conclusion From this experiment we have learned that potato soft rot can infect more plants than just potatoes. We figure this is either soft rot or something similar. Maybe it's a different strain of soft rot? As for data there wasn't much to record! The entire carrot became mushy and fell apart in our hands, although this does prove that soft rot can infect other plants in some way. I think we could extend this experiment by trying it on other ground growing vegetables. This experiment answered questions as well as bringing up new ones. What else can soft rot infect? Is the bacteria that destroyed the carrot the same one as the the potato? Maybe the soft rot worked stronger on the carrots for some reason? In the end this experiment was really interesting and we might even do it again. |
| Investigation Theme | PGST |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| School Name | Mercy McAuley High School |
| Session | Fall 2019 |