| Explore | We know that we need plants to live because they provide us with so many necessities. We discovered that plants get sick and we should be concerned for their health. We wonder what we could do to help more plants be planted in more places. |
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| Research Question | We are testing whether a deeper cut (more damage) results in more rot. We know that when inoculated, the potatoes get the soft rot disease. So we wanted to test if they were more susceptible to soft rot if they were damaged. |
| Predictions | We thought that the outcome would be that the potato would be more rotten. We figured since they were already damaged the bacteria would have a better chance at infecting. |
| Experimental Design | We plan to go about the soft rot experiment as usual; inoculating the potatoes four times, wrapping them in a moist paper towel and then placing them in an airtight bag. This time, before we wrap them up, we took a knife and put slits into the potatoes. We had one potato that had no slits, one with normal slits, and one with deep slits. We are testing the way slits affect potato soft rot. |
| Conclusion | In conclusion, we feel that our thoughts and hypothesis were correct. We assumed that the potato with deeper cuts would have a greater change. A future experiment we could do to expand on this experiment is cutting the potato fully in half to get a better reaction. An error we could have made was not inoculating enough, not getting all the air out of the bag the potatoes were placed in, or not having it in moist conditions. Our control was the potatoes we first experimented on with the normal soft rot procedure, inoculating the potatoes, wrapping them up in moist towels, and sealing them in a bag . To analyze our results we saw the rot, we felt the "mushiness" of the potato, and we also smelled the rotting potato. To conclude the soft rot experience, to get the full affects of soft rot potatoes, it has to be in the right environment and the correct type of damage to get a reaction or change. |
| Investigation Theme | PGST |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| School Name | Mercy McAuley High School |
| Session | Fall 2019 |