Introduction (25 points)
- Describe the experimental organism in a few sentences
Regardless of what actual hypothesis you tested, you all started at the same question. “Why does P. syringae caused supercooled water to freeze?”. Your lab report should have a scientific tone, yet still tell a story. This means that you need a good flow of ideas. Begin with some background on the question, then lead into what you think is the answer to that question.
- Describe the variables of your experiment:
-- Discuss any reason you have to believe that your independent variable may have an effect on your dependent variable (explain to your reader the biological significance of performing your experiment). What is it about living bacteria versus dead bacteria that might affect ice nucleation? Or the temperature of the bacteria? Etc.
-- Mention any findings of similar experiments you may have come across in your literature search. What are common causes of ice nucleation?
- State your hypothesis in the final paragraph and briefly mention the treatments
- Be sure to include citations in this section
Methods (18 points)
- Explain what you did and how you did it
- This is not a list; this is to be written in paragraph form with full sentences
- You will need enough detail for someone to perform the same experiment by reading your methods
- Include information for the entire experiment
-- setting up the experiment
-- carrying out the experiment
-- data collection/analysis
- Watch verb tense; you are describing something that has already happenned
- Because this is a formal paper, do not use “I” or “we”
-- For instance, instead of “I placed ten seeds in each of nine petri dishes”, you would say “Ten seeds were placed in each of nine petri dishes”
- Be careful to only describe the methods
-- In a full lab report, you would state the results in a separate section. Since you only need to do intro and methods for this lab, you will not state any of the...