Blog 12: Genetics Experiment Update

The fast plants are planted and growing rapidly! We planted them last Thursday (2/5/15), so they have been growing for almost a full week. A very important part of our planting process was doing the calculations for the amount of excess phosphorus and fertilizer that we were going to use while planting the seeds. After carefully weighing fertilizer pellets, calculating how much phosphorus we should use that would be proportional to both the fertilizer and soil, and doing more calculations and checking over our work, we finally mixed the soil, fertilizer, and extra phosphorus in four separate bowls and planted the seeds for our four different groups. Recap: There are 16 cells/group, and we have 4 groups. The first group is neutral, so there was no added phosphorus but just the fertilizer and soil. The small group had more phosphorus, the medium group had twice as much as the small group, and the large had twice as much phosphorus as the medium group. Doubling the amount of phosphorus made the most sense to us, and we felt that it would help our experiment succeed. Here is a low down of the measurements in a more clear and concise form: 
Added phosphorus to our plants:
small- 0.032g/group (0.002g/cell)
medium- 0.064g/group (0.004g/cell)
large- 0.128g/group (0.008g/cell)
Soil:
16.08g/group (64.32g total)
Fertilizer: 
0.384g/group (0.024g/cell & 6.144g total) 
Here are pictures that we took today when the plants were six days old. The stems all seem purple (may be hard to see in pictures), and we haven't really identified a huge change in' purpleness' between the four different groups. We are going to keep watching them and look more closely at the color intensities as we start wrapping up the experiment. This makes me question if we didn't add the appropriate amount of phosphorus or if phosphorus was not the variable to manipulate in our experiment. However, we did our research and are going to keep watching our data to see if it supports our hypothesis or not. Stay tuned!