BLOG 22 - Experimental Error

As far as experimental error goes in our experiment, there is a lot that seemed to go wrong along the way. First off, we didn't even end up using E. Coli in our experiment. This was a mistake that we realized we had made after we added Bacillus Cereus to our petri dishes of apple in the beginning. We had not done any research on this bacteria and we did not know if it's effect on the apples would be the same as E. Coli on them. We took a big leap and decided to go with it because all of our plates had already been prepared when we added it and it would have taken at least another 2-3 days of work to fix our mistake, which we did not have time to do. Second of all, a couple of control group petri dishes that we filled with agar before beginning our control group experiment were contaminated with some unknown, outside bacteria. White patches of bacteria appeared in the dishes before any kind of bacteria had even been added. This could have meant that the earlier dishes that contained our apples could have been contaminated as well without our knowing. Also, when measuring the weights of our apples, it is possible that not all of the dried agar was removed from the apple slices which could have effected the numbers that we got in the end.