March 31, 2022
New Information
Recently, I have been gathering more information necessary for this semester’s CERCA. I have been continuing my research with Arabidopsis and its response to temperature, hypocotyl growth wise. While I wish we had more information gathered, there was a period of time that we looked over how we were executing the experiment. An example of how we first implemented our experiment was by allowing the Arabidopsis plant to undergo the stratification period for 5 days, then an additional day to allow further germination before starting our investigation with the LED lights and temperature.
Happy Accident
We continued our experiment the way it was, (5-day cold/dark stratification, 1 day of germination), until I had mistakenly taken the plates out on the 4th day of stratification. We found that cutting the stratification period allowed for the plants to better germinate. That being said, we had repeated the 2 experiments we had completed last semester with the new strategy. Dr. Gingerich and I had done an analysis with the genotypes: lrb1-1/lrb2-1 mutant lines, phyB-9 phytochrome B mutant line, Wild Type, E2-1-2 and E11-6-5 enhancer lines as the independent variables. The temperatures we worked with were 22 degrees Celsius and 26 degrees Celsius using one plate under constant darkness as the control and the other plate under 10 micromoles/meter ^2/sec red LED lights.
What we know and Discovered
From our base knowledge, we know that temperature and genotype do not affect the dark control plate. The assumption we would have had is that the higher temperature, we would see less of a strong response to red light because of the quick deactivation of phytochrome B. There are some questions in regard to the enhancer lines if those would also yield a response. For now, our plan is to create a raw graph showing the raw numbers with the control included in the graph, followed by another graph without the control in order to figure out which line is most affected by temperature that would yield a weaker response to red light. From there, we are thinking of running a 2 way ANOVA test to see if there is a significant difference between these lines as well as within the lines. Lastly, a post-test called Tukey will help to see if there is a significant difference overall in order to reject the null hypothesis. We are hoping to have the posters ready by April 11th which means we only have the data mentioned to display for CERCA.
