For this lab, my Iron Chef group chose strawberries from the mystery box. With our food chosen, we decided to see if conventional or organic strawberries would grow more mold throughout the length of the experiment. We swabbed the strawberries and put it on the agar that we had previously made. With the help of the agar and the incubator, we were able to grow mold. The end goal of the project was to see which type of strawberry would grow a certain mold called botryis dextrin.
Procedures:
- Make Regular Agar and pour into 6 petri dishes.
- Make PDA and pour into 6 different petri dishes
- Refrigerate for 3 days
- Swab the outside of organic strawberries and place into 2 PDA dishes and 2 RA dishes
- Swab the outside of conventional strawberries and place into 2 PDA and 2 RA dishes
- Leave 2 RA dishes and 2 PDA dishes alone as a control
- Put all 12 dishes into an incubator
- After 1 week of incubation Take out 1 dish from each group (conventional pda, control pda, organic pda, conventional ra, control ra, organic ra) and use the ocular loop to scrape off a sample from each dish.
- Transfer these samples to individual slides and cover them with slide covers.
- Place the slides under microscopes and examine them for botrytis cinerea.
- If it is a positive id then mark it as such in the data table.
- Repeat steps 7-10 at 1.5 weeks for the other set of petri dish samples.
- Repeat steps 7-10 again at 2 weeks for the first set of petri dishes.
- Repeat steps 7-10 again at 2.5 weeks for the second set of petri dishes.
Materials:
- 1 box of strawberries (organic)
- 1 box of strawberries (non organic)
- Potato Dextrose agar
- Basic Agar
- Petri dishes
- Microscope
- Slides
- Slide covers
- Swab
- Iodine (staining as needed)
- Incubator
- Ocular Loop
Skills
- Fungus identification
- Microscope usage
- Incubator usage
- Agar plate making
Hypothesis-
If a lab technician swabs a organic and a conventional strawberry and transfers it into in an agar plate and then an incubator then the organic strawberries’ agar plate will grow more botrytis cinerea than the agar plate with the swab from the conventional strawberry because the organic strawberries are not allowed to use pesticides to prevent mold.
