Good Evening Ethan. Thank you for your question. I originally wanted to use a different compound but my partner made silver sound way cooler. the most interesting surprise was that silver nitrate gave us a difficult time, but silver itself is super effective in killing bacteria as demonstrated by the nanoparticles. I had no idea that silver was used in this capacity.
Was the formation of precipitate in your experiment surprising, or is it common for precipitate to form when conducting experiments with silver nanoparticles?
Hello Amber and thank you for your question. The precipitate was very surprising since AgNO3 is supposed to be super soluble. There was no precipitate with nanoparticles but they did remain solid in the solution too.
Regarding the formation of precipitate in your experiment, do you attribute this solely to the usage of your specific media in your experiment? How exactly do you think your results would have differed without the formation of the precipitate?
Regarding the formation of precipitate in your experiment, do you attribute the formation solely to the specific media you used? Additionally, can you elaborate on how you think your results would have exactly differed without the formation of the precipitate?
Hello Aarushi and thank you for your question. Yes, the M9 minimal media was responsible, and we believe that one of the compounds in this media was interacting with the nitrate in our compound. We tested this by creating dilutions of our compound with only the media and getting the same precipitate/clouding. The way that we tell if there is growth in the bacteria is trough light absorbance in the spectrophotometer and we believe that the clouding would absorb some of the light showing that there was “more bacteria” than there really was.
It looks like the green bar representing ampicillin does not dip below the red standard deviation line in the first bar graph figure. Does this mean that ampicillin does not count as a “hit” in this experiment?
It looks like the green bar representing ampicillin does not dip below the red standard deviation line. Does this mean that it does not count as a hit in this experiment?
Hello Sam and thank you for your question and observation. You are right because the ampicillin is not below the line it would not count as a statistical hit and that is why we put the error bars in there. We know that ampicillin if effective in killing our model organism, but this happened because there was inconsistency when creating the plates. For example, our negative control actually killing the bacteria because there was no bacteria in the well, or the ampicillin growing the bacteria because DMSO was put in that row etc… we didn’t have a large enough sample of data to account for this technical and human errors.
What did you find to be the most interesting or surprising result of your research and why?
Good Evening Ethan. Thank you for your question. I originally wanted to use a different compound but my partner made silver sound way cooler. the most interesting surprise was that silver nitrate gave us a difficult time, but silver itself is super effective in killing bacteria as demonstrated by the nanoparticles. I had no idea that silver was used in this capacity.
Was the formation of precipitate in your experiment surprising, or is it common for precipitate to form when conducting experiments with silver nanoparticles?
Hello Amber and thank you for your question. The precipitate was very surprising since AgNO3 is supposed to be super soluble. There was no precipitate with nanoparticles but they did remain solid in the solution too.
Regarding the formation of precipitate in your experiment, do you attribute this solely to the usage of your specific media in your experiment? How exactly do you think your results would have differed without the formation of the precipitate?
Regarding the formation of precipitate in your experiment, do you attribute the formation solely to the specific media you used? Additionally, can you elaborate on how you think your results would have exactly differed without the formation of the precipitate?
Hello Aarushi and thank you for your question. Yes, the M9 minimal media was responsible, and we believe that one of the compounds in this media was interacting with the nitrate in our compound. We tested this by creating dilutions of our compound with only the media and getting the same precipitate/clouding. The way that we tell if there is growth in the bacteria is trough light absorbance in the spectrophotometer and we believe that the clouding would absorb some of the light showing that there was “more bacteria” than there really was.
It looks like the green bar representing ampicillin does not dip below the red standard deviation line in the first bar graph figure. Does this mean that ampicillin does not count as a “hit” in this experiment?
It looks like the green bar representing ampicillin does not dip below the red standard deviation line. Does this mean that it does not count as a hit in this experiment?
Hello Sam and thank you for your question and observation. You are right because the ampicillin is not below the line it would not count as a statistical hit and that is why we put the error bars in there. We know that ampicillin if effective in killing our model organism, but this happened because there was inconsistency when creating the plates. For example, our negative control actually killing the bacteria because there was no bacteria in the well, or the ampicillin growing the bacteria because DMSO was put in that row etc… we didn’t have a large enough sample of data to account for this technical and human errors.