Plants and caffeine; appreciated if responded quickly :D

[duong_juli8]

Hello. I'm new here and of course, working on a science project.

I am a high school 10th grade student working on the effects of pure caffeine on the germination of 3 plants. One I want to use are Wisconsin fast plants. I would also like to use radish, but radish is the Wisconsins' relative. So should I go ahead and use radish, or opt for a totally different species?

Thank you!

Juli

[duong_juli8]

...and well, is this project "exciting" and advanced enough for my age? If not, would there be any other variations to this topic? Thank you very much, and sorry for inconvenience.

[deleted-71551]

Hi,

Your project is on "effect of caffeine on plant growth or seed germination"? Please specify, do literature search to find the type of plants used for study the effect. If you need further help, respost the question during your course of the project study.

Hope this helps.


HostSha
Secondary School Teacher

[duong_juli8]

It is on seed germination. And as I posted in the beginning, I want to use Wisconsin fast plants, radish, and mung beans. However, the first two are related to each other and I'm not sure whether it is good to use similar species. May I have help?

[donnahardy2]

Hi Juli,

You can use radish plants if you want to. Radish seeds are great for science fair project because they germinate quickly at cool temperatures. You definitely will have a better project if the seeds actually germinate. For your third plant, you can pick a related or an unrelated plant. A related plant could be turnip or mustard. If you pick an unrelated plant, do pick one that will germinate in the same temperature range as the other seeds.

Let us know if you have any other question on designing your experiment. If your independent variable in this project is the concentration of caffeine, then make sure you have plenty of trials at each concentration of caffeine. If, for example, you have a very limited space to hold containers of germinating seeds, it would be better to run duplicate or triplicate samples of each concentration of caffeine, rather than to run one trial of three different plants at each concentration. If you can set up the experiment and run it more than one time, this would be preferable to running the experiment just one time.

Good luck!

Donna Hardy