Hello guys!
So I have a SAC 5 coming up and you have to design your own experiment relating to unit 3 stuff.
My experiment was testing the effect of amylase on different types of fruits i.e watermelon, banana, apple, lemon and dates.
My hypothesis was that dates will have the highest rate of reaction.
I did my experiment and I got really unexpected results (my POV anyway) and it was that white furry fungi was growing on the apple and banana. So my experiment backfired.
I'm not sure if I can relate this to biology unit 3 concepts so does anyone know how I can relate?
I was also wondering whether anyone had any other original experiments relating to enzymes that would be good to carry out and would give quantitative data?
I am really struggling now and feel utterly hopeless. Any help at all would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Hey,
So for your experiment, it seems like you had an error due to contamination since fungi began to grow. Can you please explain what your method was in order to help others help you a little bit more? How did you measure 'rate of reaction'? And how did you add the amylase into the fruits? Did you cut up the pieces of fruit, or just leave them whole? If you did cut them up, I suspect that the fungi would have attached onto the infected fruits and would have obtained nutrients/energy from them, hence that is why you saw such a huge (guessing here) amount of fungi on the fruits (they had a pretty favourable environment).
From here, you could potentially find out why you got this error. Generally speaking, contamination is said to be a random error, but this is because we assume that experimenters are competent and very experienced (not attacking you here, this is what we assume in general, such errors occur a lot in real science, I believe).
You could then say that the fungi grew on x and y fruits but not a or b because (x and y have higher energy contents and hence are more favourable conditions for fungi to grow on). THis is what sometimes happens; we look for a specific result, only to find out that the results say that x is not related to y, but z is related to y. From here, we tailor our methodology to find out more about the results obtained. From my knowledge, this actually occurs more often than you might think. I would give an example, but don't want to ramble even more haha. If you don't want to do what I describe below, you might be able to use the bit about how fungi grow in favourable conditions, in sunlight, with lots of energy and oxygen for them to undergo aerobic respiration. This makes it really easy to link to AOS 1.
Your second option is to repeat the experiment, or to do another experiment, if time allows. There are heaps of easy experiments you can find online by googling, for example.
Like I said, giving details about the method would help a bit more I guess.
Sorry for rambling so much. Hope this helps and good luck with your sac.