Blog 15!

E-coli is a prokaryote without a nuclear membrane.  E-Coli is a rod-shaped bacteria.  It is a bacteria that grows in warmer environments and also it is able to survive outside of a host.  Usually when someone hears the word E-coli, they automatically think of food poisoning and other negative connotations such as vomiting and other stomach pains if you are infected with it.  However, even though some forms of E-coli are dangerous, the majority of them are actually completely harmless.  E-coli is in your body all the time and does good things for it.  It lives in your intestines.  E-coli can help with digestion as well as release Vitamin B and Vitamin K.  They can also prevent other harmful bacteria such as pathogenic bacteria that would otherwise reside in the intestine, E-coli helps to prevent this.   E-coli are often used as model organisms in labs.  One reason is that E-coli can be grown very easily and inexpensively.  E-coli has a cell division rate of about once every thirty minutes, making it a easy type of cell to do different types of experiments on that wont be extremely long term.  E-coli can also be manipulated in labs to produce any DNA or RNA

Blog 14!

This experiment was very different than any experiment I had ever done in a science class.  I enjoyed how we created the entire experiment by ourselves in stead of just being given one step by step and just trying to find results.  I enjoyed the long term work as our group bonded and worked well together.  Although creating our own experiment was fun, it was challenging as well.  We had ideas but we were not sure exactly how we would make them work or if things would turn out the way we wanted too.  Another difficulty we had was trying to figure out how much water to use while watering the fast plants.  Because the fast plants direction book only showed how to set up the self watering system, we did not know how much water we should use each day while using our system.  This led to a few complications as our plants seemed to be receiving too much water in the beginning.   Personally to improve the work of the experiment I could have been slightly more specific in my measurements.  Our entire group as a whole was not too great at this part of our experiment and if we had measured more specifically we could have gotten more specific results for our growth of our plants.  I don't think there is anything about our experiment that you should be specifically aware of but I do think that this experiment was a learning experience as it was much different from experiments we have done in previous years and previous classes and I think we will have an easier time with the next experiment and we will be more aware as to what to do and how to keep our testing and measuring more precise.