Practical - lab report guideline and sample report PDF

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Microbiology 1 (300833) Laboratory Report Information & Sample report This assignment is designed to test your ability to design and perform an experiment, to critically analyse the data and the design of the experiment and to write a scientific report. Scientific report writing is an important skill which is often required in the workplace. Before preparing your report, you are strongly advised to read this document as well as the marking criteria that will be used to assess your report. The marking criteria are on pp21-23 of the Learning Guide. This document includes a sample laboratory report which you can use as a guide to help you write your own report. Your report should be broken up into the sections described on page 24-25 in your laboratory manual and illustrated in the exemplar in the pages that follow. Please read this information carefully Below there are a number of additional points with which students often have difficulty when writing reports. You should keep these in mind when writing your own report and check the sample report to see how they have been achieved. Important things to look out for when writing a scientific report: 1. The data should be organised into tables, figures, graphs, and so on, but data included in a table should not be duplicated in a figure or graph. Raw data and calculated values should be shown in the Results section, and details of your calculations should be provided in an Appendix. 2. The written section of the results should summarise the data from the experiments without discussing their implications. When comparing results, compare the calculated results, not the raw data. Notes to assist with the required calculations are provided below. 3. The interpretation and conclusions section should not just be a restatement of the results but should emphasise interpretation of the data, relating them to existing theory and knowledge. In this section, it is also necessary to explain the logic that allows you to accept or reject your original hypotheses.

4. Journal articles are a good source of up to date scientific information and should be used to support your discussion and conclusions. You are expected to refer to at least two journal articles but for higher marks for this aspect of the report, there should be reference to three or more journal articles. Refereed journal articles can be accessed from the university computers through the library website. Useful search engines are PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Chemical and Biological Abstracts, Food Science and Technology Abstracts. You are advised to access these databases via the library website (rather than directly through your search engine), so that you can access full text of most articles. 5. Literature that you are discussing (journal article or book) should always be referenced in the text as well as in the reference section. Do not use direct quotes in a scholarly technical paper, ie no cut and paste. You must express ideas in your own words. Even if you reword or paraphrase what someone else has said, you must acknowledge the source of the idea or data. 6. As a rule, use past tense to describe events that have happened. Such events include procedures that you have conducted and results that you observed. Use present tense to describe generally accepted facts. Your method should be written in the past tense. 7. Note that this is an individual report. Please read carefully the note on p25 of the laboratory manual which details the parts of your report that must be individually prepared. Format of report Your report should be structured in the following sections, which will be exemplified in the annotated exemplar in the pages which follow:  Background information (150 words)  Hypothesis (1 sentence)  Methods: flow diagram with details for both experiments (1 page max)  Results: tables etc plus text (100 words)  Interpretation and conclusions (300 words max)  Critical evaluation of experimental design (300 words maximum)  References: using the Harvard system of referencing  Appendix: show examples of calculations in appendix

Calculation of plate count results One of the criteria for your experimental design was the inclusion of serial dilutions and plate counts. As well as presenting data for both experiments in your report, you should calculate your results and express them as cfu/mL. The method of calculating cfu/mL is given in your laboratory manual, and you have already had practice with this type of calculation. When performing plate counts, plates are prepared from a number of serial 10 fold dilutions. If the dilutions are correctly selected for the sample, one of the plates will have colonies in the 25-250 range, and only this result is used to calculate the cfu/mL of the original sample. In some of your experiments, the results may all have been >250 (ie TNTC - too numerous to count) or X cfu/mL c. If all the counts are zero, determine the limit of detection of your method (ie the lowest number/concentration that you could have detected by your method), and state that your count is less than this value. For example, if the lowest dilution plated was a 10-2 dilution, 1mL of this was plated and there were no colonies after incubation, the count should be recorded as...