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Do you like your strawberry jelly with or without the seeds? Are you glad to have a seed-free watermelon, or do you enjoy spitting the seeds into the garden? You might not like to find seeds in your fruit, but fruit is nature's way of dispersing seeds to make new plants. How many seeds can be dispersed for each type of fruit? As they say, in one end and out the other!
Have you ever heard someone say, "that plant is thirsty" or "give that plant a drink of water"? We know that plants, and even bouquets of cut flowers, need water to survive, but have you ever thought about how the water moves within the plant? In this science project, you'll use colored water and carnations to figure out where the water goes.
Up, up, and away! If you have ever made a wish and blown the fluff of a dandelion, you have witnessed how some plants are adapted to spreading their seeds using the wind. The tiny, furry parachute allows the seeds to be picked up by the wind and to be carried far away from their parent plant. In this experiment, you will make models of seeds and fruit to investigate dispersal by wind and to evaluate
the relationship between the structure of the seed and its ability to be dispersed by the wind.
Everyone loves the beautiful colors of fall, but where do they come from and how does the change in colors happen? In this project, you will uncover the hidden colors of fall by separating plant pigments with paper chromatography. What colors will you see?
Leaves use sunlight to make food for the plant. Sunlight contains all of the colors of the rainbow, but are all of those colors used by the leaf? Can you find out if some colors of light are more imporant than others?
Did you know that potatoes have eyes? Not eyes for seeing, but eyes for making roots. Why don't the eyes of potatoes in the store have roots on them? Do this experiment, and watch a potatoes eyes grow out!
Do you like to watch outdated science fiction and cheesy horror movies? Many fictional tales of cloned organisms have been created based upon the scientific method for cloning animals or plants. In the real world, the cloning of plants is a common method used in modern agriculture. How do you clone a plant?
Plants need nitrogen to build proteins and nucleic acids to grow healthy stems and leaves. Though the Earth's atmosphere is made up of 79% nitrogen, the form of nitrogen found in the atmosphere cannot be used by plants. In this experiment, you will compare plants grown without nitrogen fertilizer to plants grown with nitrogen fertilizer.
We all know that plants need sunlight and water to grow big and tall. But did you know that inside seeds are baby plants, and that the fragile baby plant inside the seed needs to be protected? If you've ever had a sunburn, you also know that the sun gives off harmful radiation and heat. How much radiation and heat can a seed handle? Find out using some radish seeds, an oven, and your microwave!
Do you like to climb trees? The branches of trees are what make them so fun to climb. Each branch starts out as a tiny shoot that grows out from a stem. How is the growth of shoots along a stem regulated?
As we humans zip from place to place, we often forget to stop and smell the roses. Compared to our fast-paced lifestyle, plants seem rooted to the spot. Don't be deceived by appearances however, plants are on the move! This experiment will investigate the stimulus/response relationship in plants and prove that plants can move up and down in response to gravity.
Like humans, plants can be negatively affected by overcrowding. Unlike humans, plants cannot get up and move to a new environment or explore how to utilize new resources. This experiment will explore the effects of crowding (population density) on the growth and health of plants.
You might not know it, but plants are able to sense their environment and actually respond appropriately. One of the key parameters that every plant must respond to is the direction of gravity: stems go up (opposite to the pull of gravity) and roots go down (in the same direction as the force of gravity). In this project, you will construct simple devices that hold several germinating seeds, which allow you to watch how growing rootlets respond as you rotate the devices, effectively altering the direction of gravity.
Cryopreservation—storing seeds in ultra-cold liquid nitrogen—is one method for maintaining plant genetic stocks in seed banks. Can seeds withstand a really deep freeze and still germinate?
Plants have evolved many clever mechanisms to ensure that their seeds will wait for appropriate conditions before sprouting. Some may only germinate after a fire, others only after going through a cold spell. This project explores one important variable among many that determine the ideal conditions for seed germination.
We have all heard the old saying, "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch." Due to the production of the plant hormone ethylene during the ripening process, this saying proves true! This experiment will investigate the role of ethylene in the process of fruit ripening.
Everybody knows that worms are good for the soil, but not everybody knows why. Here's an idea for measuring how efficiently earthworms turn over organic surface material into the soil.
Hydrogen peroxide (often used as a disinfectant) has been approved for use in pesticides. This project investigates whether hydrogen peroxide has any effects on seed germination or rooting of plant cuttings.
Plants need nitrogen to build proteins and nucleic acids to grow healthy stems and leaves. Though the Earth's atmosphere is made up of 79% nitrogen, the form of nitrogen found in the atmosphere cannot be used by plants. In this experiment, you will compare the increase in biomass of clover plants grown in soil with no nitrogen added, in soil with nitrogen fertilizer added and in soil with nitrogen-fixing bacteria added.
Everybody knows that worms are good for the soil, but not everybody knows why. Here's a project that investigates just one of the ways earthworms improve the earth.
Humic acid is touted as an organic soil additive to improve plant growth by multiple means. Does it really work? Here's how you can find out.
Additional Project Ideas
Note: The following project ideas are abbreviated, without notes to start your background research or a procedure for how to do the experiment. You can identify abbreviated project ideas by the asterisk at the end of the title. If you want a project idea with full instructions, please pick one without an asterisk.
Plants need a way to bring water and nutrients up from the roots into the leaves and shoots of the plant for growth to occur. Plants have a vascular system for moving these materials through to different parts of the plant. The xylem transports material from the roots to the shoots, and the phloem transports material from the leaves to the shoots...
Fruit is a strategy some plants use to attract animals to disperse seeds. The animals eat the fruit and disperse the seeds through the digestive system. To attract animals, fruit needs to ripen and develop an odor that acts as an attractant. How much more successful are ripe fruits at attracting animals? Try setting out an over and under ripe...
Plant stems grow through a process of elongation due to cell divisions within the stem. Does the entire length of the stem elongate evenly? Or do certain regions along the plant stem grow more or less than others? Regions that are involved in active growth are called vegetative. You can conduct an experiment to show which regions of a bean...
Global warming is how scientists describe the gradual warming of our global climate. Scientists think that the trend towards global warming can be attributed to the build up of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere from industrialization. Another problem is deforestation, as we remove plants and trees from the environment to meet a high...
Some plants grow only in water-logged environments. These plants are usually native to wetlands and are important for the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems. Wetland ecosystems are very fragile and susceptible to the toxic dumping of sewage and fertilizer run-off from neighboring farm land. One very common aquatic plant called duckweed inhabits...
Leaves grow in a different pattern than stems and shoots. They do not elongate along one axis, but instead spread out over time. Do all regions of the leaf grow equally? You can use markings on different regions of a growing leaf to see if the whole surface grows, or if growth is focused in a particular region, like the veins or edges of the...
Trees grow more during the early spring than they do the rest of the year. Because of this period of dormancy, or lack of growth, each year of growth is marked by a line called a tree ring. You can count the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk to show how old the tree is. You can also count the number of rings in a stem to see...
Chlorophyll is a natural pigment found in green plants. It is the primary pigment that absorbs light energy from the sun for photosynthesis. This energy is then used by the plant to synthesize glucose from carbon dioxide and water. Chlorophyll in the leaves of plants can be extracted and separated using chromatography. A good source of chlorophyll...
Mushrooms are not plants, but are fungi. Fungi include mushrooms, molds and lichen. They do not produce seeds to reproduce like some plants. Fungi produce spores, like more primitive plants do. The spores of a mushroom are contained in the tiny folds around the stem underneath the mushroom cap. Different species of mushrooms have different types...
Germination is the process by which a seed emerges from the seed coat. Many different variables can effect the process of germination. Try to sprout seeds from different species of plant to see if different species vary in germination time. Are weeds faster germinators than vegetables? Try measuring seeds and then germinating them to see if big...
Soil may look like a bunch of dirt, but good quality soil is actually a complex mixture of dirt, nutrients, microorganisms, insects and worms. What type of benefit do these microorganisms offer a growing plant? You can test this by baking soil in the oven to sterilize and kill the microorganisms. Do plants grown in sterile soil do better than...
Flower development is an important part of plant growth. When a plant has reached maturity, it needs to develop flowers in order to reproduce. The male and female parts of the flower have specialized structures for reproduction that develop as the plant matures. How do flowers develop over time? Which structures develop first? You can answer...
Resources
Bibliography
- Cobb, V. 1979. More Science Experiments You Can Eat. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
- Gardner, R. and Webster, D. 1987. Science in Your Backyard. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
- VanCleave, J. 1993. Janice VanCleave's A+ Projects in Biology. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Vecchione, G. 2001. 100 Award-Winning Science Fair Projects. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing.
Experimental Procedure
If you are going to conduct an experiment in the area of Plant Biology, your experiment will most likely involve growing plants under varying conditions to determine which condition has the greatest impact on the plants. In order to collect valid data for your experiment, you will need to use some consistent techniques for measuring plant growth. Click the following link for commonly used techniques that you can use for your experiment: Measuring Plant Growth
