Iron Chef Competition

Today we watched the presentations of the other iron 'chef' group lab experiments. Each team had different items depending on what they picked. Each team had to come up with a hypothesis, a procedure, a purpose, and etc. Every two teams were competing with the same ingredients.

We started with the fresh strawberries groups.

Team 1: They used enzymes to digest down strawberries. They tested to see what kind of strawberry would digest the fastest. They dropped both conventional and organic strawberries in amylase, pectinase, and mixtures of the two. They put strawberries in beakers of water, pectinase, amylase and the mixture then measured the displacement. There were a couple of problems however, evaporation was greater in some beakers than others, the marks weren't precise enough, light got into the beakers to cause more evaporation, there weren't enough strawberries, some beakers were different sizes, the measuring tools weren't precise, there was even mold growth, and increased the displacement. Disregarding evaporation, there wasn't any difference in between conventional and organic digestion. They were originally testing to see how conventional and organic food would digest, but there was no visible difference.

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Team 2: This team tested to see which grew more mold (betridus cinerea), conventional or organic strawberries. They made agar to put the strawberries in. They used regular agar and potato dextrin agar. They swabbed the strawberries, opened the petri dish and spread it across the agar. They kept the agar in the incubator for two weeks. Then they stained the petri dish so they could see the mold growth. They looked for gram negative and gram positive microbes in the dishes. Their timing was a bit off, their incubator got turned off for a day, they didn't have a strong microscope and they didn't always wear gloves. If they were to do it again they would wait longer for the fungus to grow.

(Team 2 Moved on to the next round!)

Pesticides

Team 1:  They tested different amount of pesticides to see which affected animal or plant cells more. They used yeast because it acts as an animal cell, they activated for about 10 to 15 minutes, then added sugar and pesticide once every two days for two weeks. The yeast with pesticide died, while the ones with pesticide stayed alive as they added the sugar. An error was that ants got into the classroom. Then they tested against basil to see if the pesticide affected plants. 3 had pesticide, and the one without pesticide. The ones with pesticide started drying out and the leaves started breaking off easily. The pesticide did affect the plants. It was the only one with ta positive increase, the rest had a decrease. They measured by height. The main purpose of the experiment was to see how pesticides affect the food people eat and the animal cells that humans have. The judge felt like there should have been more control groups, and show the change of height and not just the overall height.

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Team 2: Their hypothesis was to see if organic or conventional grew more bacteria after having pesticide put on them. They made agar then got their two materials. They got organic chuck meat and conventional chuck meat and organic and non-organic apples. It lasted two weeks with a total of five collection days. Sometimes there was mold on the agar groups, sometimes there wasn't anything especially in the control groups. Their basic reason for this experiment was that conventional is usually covered in pesticides. Organic is not allowed to have more than .1% pesticide. The incubator was turned off for a day also. The organic chuck was the one that stunk up the room the most. Ants started coming into the room. They weren't able to check the dishes every day. The incubator overheated near the end of the experiment. If they were to do it again they would use more dishes so they had more groups to check for more growth. They would measure more and they would work in a more controlled environment.

(Team 1 Moved on to the next round! )

Sugars

Team 1: This group swabbed sugars to see how bacteria acts after being fed different sugars. The overarching goal was to relate the bacteria growth is like cell growth. They put a different sugar in each petri dish. They wanted to see which one promoted the most cell growth. First, they had to make the agar. They used agar tablets, a hot plate, distilled water, a beaker, and a heat protecting glove. They used bacteria from the back of phones and then observe how the bacteria grew with different sugars. They counted the amount of bacterial colonies and averaged out three counts, then averaged out all the times. They used honey, cane sugar, corn syrup and a control group.

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Team 2: This team used the sugars to test for glucose levels in the human body. They picked out their human subjects. Every core day they would test and monitor blood. They pricked fingers to test blood. They started with a week to see their regular blood sugar level. Each week they tested out a different sugar, from cane sugar to honey to corn syrup. They then found the averages of the sugar. Honey had the highest increase in blood sugar levels. There were some holes in their data. If they were to do it again, they would do it for longer and with more people.

(Team 1  Moved on to the next round! )            

Corn

Team 1:  They began by talking about BPA. It is a chemical found in plastic containers and the inside of cans. BPA would be found in most of the ingredients the group was given. BPA is toxic and can hurt cells. They extracted BPA straight from a plastic water bottle. They worked with the A.P. Chem teacher to do this. BPA has a significant lower melting rate than plastic so they were able to melt out the BPA. They wanted to see differences in between the BPA cells and the control groups. They weren't able to get conclusive results but they learned a lot about how to make an experiment and how to make BPA. BPA is a toxic chemical and the group learned to avoid letting plastic melt that can have BPA because it can cause cancer and other diseases.

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Team 2: They tested to see how bacteria grew on different types of corn. They learned how to use a microscope. Then they learned how to make their own agar. Then they learned how to count colonies electronically. They ran it through a program by masking the image then tracked the amount of colonies. They swabbed bacteria from surfaces then covered the corn with it. They took pictures of them every core day, a total of six days. There were some errors. The colony counting was messed up first. The petri dishes weren't sterilized. The incubator was turned off one day so that skewed the results. The incubator dried up the agar at one point. Frozen corn killed the most bacteria and the conventional corn gathers a lot of bacteria and grows the most. They consider frozen corn to be the best choice for people with autoimmune disorders and its better for the world so that they can eat healthier non-frozen food.

(Team 1  Moved on to the next round!)

Team 1: The first team put teeth into the different drinks. They saw how each of the teeth decayed and grew plaque in the different drinks.

Team 2: Our team, so check out this post to see more.

(Team 2 Moved on to the next round! Yay!)

And after one final round, the winner is the Corn team that melted BPA from plastic. Good job everybody!