The Effect of Type and Packaging on the Bacteria Growth of Lettuce

The purpose of this experiment was to compare the effect industrialized packaging had on bacteria growth in several different types of lettuce. In order to achieve these results, we first cut a 3cm. by 3cm. layer of lettuce and placed it into water that had previously been boiling in order to sterilize it and kill all preexisting bacteria. After stirring it efficiently and allowing time for the bacteria to wash off, we used an inoculation loop and test tubes to lower the amount of bacteria we would be working with and poured the final test tube into a culture plate. After placing them in the incubator, we waited three days for the bacteria to grow and then took pictures of every culture plate. We used Adobe PhotoShop to highlight the percentage of the plate that contained bacteria and used the percentage with the total surface area of a blank plate to find the surface area of bacteria growth. We used these results to perform an analysis of variation (ANOVA) test. The results of the ANOVA forced us to fail to reject the null; this means that the different types of lettuce, packaged and unpackaged, did not have a significantly different amount of bacteria on them.

Research Done By:

Sal Krupa
L'Anse Creuse North

Brandon Redoute
L'Anse Creuse

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