Fast Plants Project Paper PDF

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Lab report regarding fast plant project, the last experiment of the course...

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Mary Angela Senter Dr. O’Neill BIO 201 13 December 2019 Title: The Effect of Hydrogen Peroxide on the Growth of Fast Plants, Brassica Rapa Hypothesis: The addition of hydrogen peroxide to the water during the early stages of the fast plant life cycle will lead to an increase in growth. Rationale: This rationale is supported by the literature which supports the idea that hydrogen peroxide increases the germination percentage of fast plant seeds and early plant growth. On a mechanistic level, hydrogen peroxide leads to an increase in the production of proteins that relate to plant development, signaling, and the cell cycle, which contributes to growth. Results: The addition of hydrogen peroxide did cause an increase in the growth of our fast plants. The mean plant height was statistically significant, with a p-value of less than 0.05 for each of our test groups in comparison with our control group (Fig. 1). Figure 2 shows that the addition of a higher concentration of hydrogen peroxide to the different test groups had an increasingly negative effect on the height of the plants. The mean leaf length was not statistically significant, with a p-value of greater than 0.05 between each of the experimental groups and the control group. Despite having the smallest mean height, group D had the largest average leaf length (Fig. 3). Discussion and Future Direction: The data collected refute our hypothesis that adding hydrogen peroxide to the water during the early stages of the fast plant life cycle would lead to an increase in growth. While the mean plant height was statistically significant, our hypothesis predicted that there would be more growth, meaning the plants receiving the treatment would be taller. Our collected data shows that the experimental groups experienced significantly less growth than the control group. The height of each test group decreased, depending on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide added. This means that the control group had the tallest plants, as it received no hydrogen peroxide, and group D, which received the highest concentration of 0.50M hydrogen peroxide, had the shortest plants. Factors that may have affected the outcome of our experiment include contamination from other groups’ experiments, incorrect potting, and insufficient watering after first potting. These results show that fast plants do not have a positive response to the addition of hydrogen peroxide to their water. Fast plants were bred for the purpose of quickly cultivating a large number of plants to be used for genetic research. Because fast plants were bred to grow quickly, then they may not benefit from hydrogen peroxide, which can speed up the growth of seedlings. Hydrogen peroxide is a reactive oxygen species (ROS) and is essential to many life processes of plants, such as respiration and photosynthesis (Ismail et al., 2015). Future experiments could be performed to find the correct amount of hydrogen peroxide to be added to plants for them to show an increase in growth.

Literature Cited: Ismail, S. Z., M. M. Khandaker, N. Mat, and A. N. Boyce. 2015. Effects of Hydrogen Peroxide on Growth, Development and Quality of Fruits: A Review. https://scialert.net/fulltextmobile/?doi=ja.2015.331.336. Wojtyla, Łukasz, Katarzyna, Kubala, Szymon, and Małgorzata. 2016, January 14. Different Modes of Hydrogen Peroxide Action During Seed Germination. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2016.00066/full.

Figure and Figure Legends:

Figure 1. Mean plant height of fast plants from four different treatments of hydrogen peroxide: A (control), B (0.01M), C (0.05M), and D (0.1M). Bars are means +/- SEM. Each treatment had 16 replicates, data was only collected from the surviving plants. N = 11 (A), 10 (B), 12 (C), and 2 (D). Results from ANOVA with posthoc comparisons show an overall p < 0.0001 with comparisons between each treatment as follows: A vs. B (p < 0.05), A vs. C (p < 0.01), A vs. D (p < 0.05), B vs. C (p > 0.05), B vs. D (p > 0.05), and C vs. D (p > 0.05).

Figure 2. Comparison of each experimental group to the control group. Plants are arranged from the tallest to the shortest, from left to right, the control group (no hydrogen peroxide), group B (0.01M), group C (0.05M), and group D (0.10M), respectively.

Figure 3. Average leaf length of fast plants from our four hydrogen peroxide treatments: A (control group), B (0.01M), C (0.05M), D (0.10M). Error bars mean +/- SEM. There were 16 replicates in each experimental group, and data was collected from the surviving plants. A vs. B (p > 0.05), A vs. C (p > 0.05), A vs. D (p > 0.05), B vs. C (p > 0.05), B vs. D (p > 0.05), C vs. D (p > 0.05)....