Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

HI!

I need some help on how to add some numbers/statistics to my project for science fair. My project is testing the effectiveness of bacteriophage T4 on E. coli and also testing it on bacteria swabbed from common locations. I have taken many pictures of the process but I don’t know how to put it into numbers. The help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Hi Kaaatherine,

An easy way to add quantitative data (numbers), would be to take pictures a different times of the culture and looking at how they change over time. Another idea could be to give it an efficiency from just observation, so for example if one of your samples looks like half is gone, you could call it 50% efficient and you could compare the efficiency of each of the swabs.

I hope this helps and good luck!

Hello Kaatherine,

Are you seeing individual colonies of organisms (bacteria) on the plates? If so, another way to get quantitative information would be to count the number of colonies. If you don't see organisms, then follow the previous suggestion for scoring the proportion of sample that is gone (or left), and then you could make a graph showing the proportions on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. Let us know if this helps!

Madeline
Moderator

Thank you guys!

This has helped me a lot!