Plants have mass, they matter!
- Project reviewer
Joined 14 Sep 2018
Project by group gehsbeardsleyfall2018
Info
| Explore | We are experimenting to discover how different wavelengths of light impact wildtype plants and mutated plants. We’re using the mutation of Phytochrome B at gene number AT2G18790. This mutation causes de-etiolation, which results in the plant being unable to perform shade avoidance. |
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| Research Question | How do the wildtype and mutant of Phytochrome B differ in hypocotyl length and leaf area depending on the light source: close red, far red and white? |
| Predictions | If we place the mutation of Phytochrome B seeds; (with a mutation at the gene AT2G18790) in far red light and close red light, the hypocotyls will be shorter, leaf area larger in comparison to the wild type. If placed in white light, the mutated seeds will be similar in comparison to the wild... |
| Experimental Design | We have three different set ups. We have a far red light, a white light with red film, and a white light. The red lights are used to simulate shade and the white being light. In each of the three groups we have two different planting chambers. Each setup consists of two planting chambers:... |
| Conclusion | Our experiment tested the effects different wavelengths of light have on the growth of Landsberg Erecta and mutation phy-5 in Phytochrome B. In Far Red Light: both the mutant and wild type were unable to grow as expected, and died. In Near Red Light phy-5 does not etiolate whereas Landsberg... |
| About this Project |
Updates
As this research project is now in the final stages of wrapping-up, we wish to thank everyone who participated in this inquiry; the students, mentors, teachers and others behind the scenes. We appreciate all of your efforts and contributions to this online learning community.
Scientific exploration is a process of discovery that can be fun! There are many unanswered questions about plants just waiting for new scientists to consider, investigate, and share.
We will be archiving groups and projects on December 17, after which time new posts will not be able to be added. Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Project Gallery anytime to view this project in the future. You can search the Gallery by key word, team name, topic, or school name.
Good bye for now.
Warm regards,
The PlantingScience team
It’s great to see that teams from your school are wrapping up and posting conclusions. Enjoy the final stages of your project, and feel free to post any final comments or questions you have for your mentors.
Hi Ammarah, Salmah & Emmie,
It’s great to see that you had some interesting results from your experiments! I hope your class presentation was also a success. You all conducted great work and had plenty of thoughtful questions on the topic; these are some of the keys to success in scientific research.
From this experience, I hope you consider higher learning and careers in the plant sciences. Many colleges and universities offer such programs, plus there is a large and engaged community of plant scientists and teachers online as a part of professional societies such as the American Society of Plant Biologists (https://aspb.org/) and the Botanical Society of America (https://www.botany.org/).
Good luck at school and with all your future pursuits!
Dear Chris J.Meyer, thank so much for all the help that you have provided throughout our experiment. Your guidance really aided us and for that we are so grateful.
Sincerely, Ammarah
Hi Chris,
We'd like to thank you for guiding us through our project. Your feedback really helped us learn as much as we could about our work and will help us even more later on. Thank you, and good luck with any future research!
Hi Chris, we wanted to say personally thank you much for helping us. You were very helpful with opinions on what’s best for us. I personally appreciate how much advisory you gave us. I know you are very busy and so it means a lot that you took time to help us, thank you so much.
Hi,
Today is our last day of measuring the plants. We are currently finding the area measurements of a cauline leaf from each plant. We’re using a program called Image J to find the leaf area.
Hello,
thank you for the advice. Our teacher said she has a program that calculates leaf area... so we are thinking to use that. We will measure each rosette and find an average, we will use that to create a bar graph.
Thanks for sending along the labelled photo of some of your plants.
First, there are two types of leaves in Arabidopsis: 1) “rosette leaves” located at the base of the plant, and 2) “cauline leaves” located further up the stem. I see that the focus of your measurements will be rosette leaves, which is good. (That said, you may also want to measure the area of cauline leaf blades…)
Your blue labels denote the widest diameter of the whole rosette. Such a measurement includes the lengths of rosette leaf blades and petioles. It is a good idea to measure this so that you can then calculate total rosette area. There is advanced software that helps scientists calculate this properly, but feel free to assume the general shape of the whole rosette and use an appropriate area equation (for example, area of a circle = pi * radius2). Calculate rosette area for each white light wildtype plant (how many plants?), and then calculate the average ± standard deviation. Repeat these same calculations for all other groups of plants (white light mutants, red light wildtypes, red light mutants). All this data would look great together on a bar graph!
Your red labels specifically denote the length of rosette leaf blades, but you may also want to measure the width of these blades. Then you can then calculate rosette leaf blade area using an equation such as for an ellipse = pi * length radius * width radius. Calculate leaf blade area for each healthy and mature leaf on each white light wildtype plant (how many leaves and how many plants?), and then calculate the average ± standard deviation. Repeat these same calculations for all other groups of plants (white light mutants, red light wildtypes, red light mutants). All this data would look great together on a bar graph! In addition, you may want to measure petiole lengths as they appear shorter in mutant plants compared to wildtype.
Hello!
Thank you for your opinion. We are thinking about just focusing on leaves and stem length.. with the idea of leaf area, we have a question. In what way would you recommend measuring the leaves. The total leaf area (blue) of the entire plant or individual plants (red)? I attached pictures to show the two idea of measuring I’m describing.
Hi team,
Good to hear that you are getting interesting results. Plus, it is a valuable experience for you having to discard the “red light plants”. Although scientists have good intentions when starting a new experiment, they also need to prepare for the possibility of unusual or unexpected outcomes and then adapt appropriately without getting overly frustrated. Perseverance, optimism, and thoughtful tweaks to experiments are often needed.
While quantifying chlorophyll in leaves is an important measure of plant health, you may be able to omit this analysis if it will be too time consuming or labor intensive. That said, you should at least photograph and qualitatively observe the green color of the leaves, and then describe similarities or differences in your results. You may want to suggest to your teacher to purchase a hand-held chlorophyll meter for future classes. Here is the one I’m thinking of: www.atleaf.com
Also... do you think it would be okay if we didn’t do chlorophyll. We were thinking about just sticking to leaf area and stem length because they correspond with each other. There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in chlorophyll.. or enough to do a whole section about.
Hi Chris,
today is October 30 and we are on day 18 of our experiment. Our red light plants have dies so we were told to dispose of them. Our red film plants are working perfectly! The wildtype is tall and has small leaves, whereas the mutant is short and wide with many thick leaves. In white light, our wildtype is growing very tall! Our mutant is pretty tall as well. Everything is on point. We will probably measure the leaf area in less than a week!
Hi Chris,
Today is day 13 of our experiment. We took measurements of all our plants and realized that our plants in red light have stopped growing. We won’t be measuring them from now on. The white light wildtype and mutant plants have grown at similar rates. We also noticed how for the white light with red film, the WT has a longer stem and less leaves, but the mutation has a shorter stem and many leaves. We’ll keep collecting data for the next few weeks!