UT Knoxville BIOL 140 - Lab Communication 4 (3 pages)

Unformatted text preview:

Payal Patel Section 16 Group 4 Lab Communication 4 What light color would cause the best growth of Synechococcus sp skinny Introduction Different plants have been tested in recent times to see which would be the most efficient in providing fuel for our motorized vehicles Billions of dollars are spent on the research of biofuels each year in the United States of America It has been recognized that optimal growing conditions must be upheld for growth of the plants One thing that has been discovered is that different pigments in the plant absorb different wavelengths colors of light that is then transferred into energy to be used in photosynthesis In the experiment the primary goal was to see what wavelength of light would be the optimal growing condition for the cyanobacteria skinny Bourne 2007 It was hypothesized that growing the culture in green light would inhibit the growth of the skinny because the color is not absorbed by the pigment for energy but rather reflected There would be more growth of the skinny in the control than the sample grown in green light Methods In the experiment the control was the sample of skinny that was grown in normal lighting It was not treated with a colored light There were no replicates Growing one sample in green light and the other in blue tested the samples the independent variable The dependent variable was the amount of growth of the skinny that resulted from the light in which the individual samples were grown There were several methods used to collect the data The weight of the pellets after centrifuging the samples was used to know how much growth there was in the presence of green blue and normal light Another way data was collected were the TLC plates that separated the different pigments present in the algae and the spectrophotometer that measured the wavelengths of color in the sample Results Figure 1 In figure 1 you can see the distance each pigment traveled up the TLC plate On the left is the skinny grown in blue light