Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I want to work on a project on testing the immune system of different animals. I've thought of placing a drop of blood(of a specific animal) on a bacteria culture and adding an anti clotting agent with the blood so it doesn't clot during the 12 hours of testing but i've got a feeling it wont work. Can anyone please help me out here and tell me what to do?

Hi!
First of all, you should be very careful about using the fluids of other vertebrates. In particular, if you hope to submit your project to science fairs in the future, many have specific guidelines against what you can and cannot use, and how you can manipulate each type of material. In spite of that, I think that you have some interesting ideas. As long as you be careful what species of bacteria you use and find a way in which to concretely measure immunity (how many bacteria are left,etc.), this would be a really cool project!

Thanks for the advice, I was thinking of using agar dishes since they are widely available and measuring how far the bacteria is from the blood drop (just like the test for pennicilin) as measurment of how immune an animal is (at least from 1 kind of bacteria).