Unfortunately I don’t think so. We performed a serial dilution at 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25%, 3.125%, and so on until we reached 12 serial dilutions, and then added 90 microliters of bacteria and 10 microliters of our dilutions to three wells. None of them showed any difference in absorbance(IE bacterial growth or lack of growth) from the DMSO results(negative control) on that plate. Our TA suggested that the error could be due to the compounds having some effect but the bacteria growing anyway because they feed on the sugars in the fruit in the compound. We only ran the one plate last week, and had to ask for special permission to do so, so we can’t say for sure that the herbal remedy wouldn’t work at all given another chance, but it does seem unlikely. I think the Mampong Herbal Enterica could be tested in vivo, like actual cells, and we might see some more conclusive evidence in that regard.
What do you think was the main cause for receiving contradictory results, and how would you change your experiments to make your results more consistent?
I think it comes down to consistent dilutions and ensuring that the experiment was tested as it was intended to be. I made our stock for the compounds, but the amount of accuracy for our scale led to some error, and then the compounds were diluted once more past our compounds stock, making a concentration that was well below effective levels for multiple experiments. I think it is likely that our first test that showed statistically significant killing of bacteria was correct, and if I could redo the experiments again without the errors, and with more grams of our Chlorogenic acid, as our dry supply of Chlorogenic acid ran out during our second to last test and we had to use old stock solutions, I think it is likely that our results would be much more conclusive and hopefully applicable findings if we had been able to run those tests again. However, I was absent from lab the day that our dilution errors were made, and only found the error in our lab notebook, so it is possible that our errors were unrelated to this, and we could have had another error, like contamination of ampicillin in our wells of the first combined trial.
Could the results of Mampong Herbal Enterica also be related to over-dilution?
Unfortunately I don’t think so. We performed a serial dilution at 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25%, 3.125%, and so on until we reached 12 serial dilutions, and then added 90 microliters of bacteria and 10 microliters of our dilutions to three wells. None of them showed any difference in absorbance(IE bacterial growth or lack of growth) from the DMSO results(negative control) on that plate. Our TA suggested that the error could be due to the compounds having some effect but the bacteria growing anyway because they feed on the sugars in the fruit in the compound. We only ran the one plate last week, and had to ask for special permission to do so, so we can’t say for sure that the herbal remedy wouldn’t work at all given another chance, but it does seem unlikely. I think the Mampong Herbal Enterica could be tested in vivo, like actual cells, and we might see some more conclusive evidence in that regard.
What do you think was the main cause for receiving contradictory results, and how would you change your experiments to make your results more consistent?
I think it comes down to consistent dilutions and ensuring that the experiment was tested as it was intended to be. I made our stock for the compounds, but the amount of accuracy for our scale led to some error, and then the compounds were diluted once more past our compounds stock, making a concentration that was well below effective levels for multiple experiments. I think it is likely that our first test that showed statistically significant killing of bacteria was correct, and if I could redo the experiments again without the errors, and with more grams of our Chlorogenic acid, as our dry supply of Chlorogenic acid ran out during our second to last test and we had to use old stock solutions, I think it is likely that our results would be much more conclusive and hopefully applicable findings if we had been able to run those tests again. However, I was absent from lab the day that our dilution errors were made, and only found the error in our lab notebook, so it is possible that our errors were unrelated to this, and we could have had another error, like contamination of ampicillin in our wells of the first combined trial.
Woah, great science, even better video production! Good job throughout the whole semester!