Simulating gut bacteria?

[vidyarajca80]

Hi,
Is there a way I can help my 12 year old simulate gut bacteria at home? Appreciate any inputs.

[jskanderson]

Hi,
Is there a way I can help my 12 year old simulate gut bacteria at home? Appreciate any inputs.

Hi,

Welcome to the Science Buddies forum! Unfortunately, there isn't really a way for you to help your child simulate gut bacteria. However, we may be able to help if we have more details about your child's project! What project is your child working on and what is his goal? To help your child as much as possible, we would also like more details on what he will be testing on simulated gut bacteria!


-JSK

[vidyarajca80]

Hi,
Thank you for your feedback/inputs.

My child wants to test the effects of healing liquids (vegetable juices/fruit juices/herb water) on the levels of good and bad bacteria in the gut. Any thoughts on how to conduct this experiment at home if we cannot simulate gut bacteria?

Thanks again!

[maleencabe]

Hi Vidyarajca80!

This answer may be well past the time you've actually need it, but there's a couple things you can try to help execute this experiment.

1. Obtaining/making nutrient agar plates that have some "healing liquid" incorporated into it. This can be easily made up as it's essentially just jello for bacteria.

2. It would be hard to obtain "gut bacteria" to do this experiment, but you can do things like cough or sneeze, into the media and allow these items to sit in warm temps for a day or so to see if there's any growth.

3. Good and bad bacteria aren't really two separate entities. If anything, bad bacteria are just bacteria that find an opportunity to overgrow and cause issues in one's system and are actually the normal bacterial flora that one would find in their system.. So, you should narrow down your hypothesis to just testing the effects of healing liquids on bacterial growth and see what you get.

Hope this helps!