| Explore | Helping our moms plant a garden and whats edible and not edible. We have discovered that there pathologist for plants when they get sick. Why plants get sick from so many different things? Why there are so many plant diseases? Why plants can multiply so fast and affect the community? |
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| Research Question | Could jicama have the same results as the potato during the soft rot experiment? Jicama is like a potato but it has more starch in it, it's sweeter, and it is from a different country. |
| Predictions | The jicama might become mushier and the disease might spread more. Since there is more starch in the jicama the inoculant might spread more throughout it. |
| Experimental Design | Do the same thing that we did to make the inoculant for the potatoes but with jicama. Cut the jicama in half, put it in a plastic bag with 50 mL of water, and leave it alone for a week. The next week take 3 jicamas and poke them with a toothpick with the inoculant on top, bottom, and both sides. Then wrap each of them in a damp paper towel and put them in a gallon plastic bag. Then leave them for a week. The next week look at the results. The variables are how mushy the jicama gets and comparing the results with the regular potato. We will record the data by asking the same questions we were asked when we did the potato soft rot experiment. |
| Conclusion | The starch from the jicamas prevented the inoculant from infecting them. The jicama had less of a reaction than the potato because of the starch in it. The data we collected did not support our hypothesis because we were wrong about how the jicama would react to the inoculant. We did reject our hypothesis. We did use a control in the experiment and the control jicama just got moldy and made a liquid in the bag. The inside of the control was normal but it was barely mushy. The jicama was mushy but the disease did not spread throughout the jicama like we thought it would. Where we inoculated it the jicama turned slightly purple from where the tooth pic went into the jicama. To help some of the experiments in the future we could have maybe inoculated it more to get an abnormal reaction in the jicama, or we could use smaller jicamas to get a reaction that is more controlled. Some errors that could have happened could have been there was no jicama at the store we would have to rethink about doing another experiment. Also, the jicama didn't really have the symptoms of soft rot experiments because it was a little mushy and it stunk, but where we inoculated it stayed in one spot and did not spread like how it spread in the potatoes. |
| Investigation Theme | PGST |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| School Name | Mercy McAuley High School |
| Session | Fall 2019 |