Honors Program Theses

Award/Availability

Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

James Jurgenson

Abstract

ln this project, growth and transformability of E. coli and A. tumefaciens were investigated. The growth of the bacterial species was monitored under different key parameters including: the strain of the bacteria, the inoculum source (a fresh plate or frozen glycerol stock), and the media type. Growth was monitored by measuring the optical density (OD). Using E. coli strains Dh5a and CdB\ it was determined that the strain, the media type, and the amount of inoculum had a great effect on the growth but the source of the inoculum had little effect. For A. tumefaciens, the strain and the media type had a great effect on the growth and the source of the inoculum had a great effect for one strain's growth but little effect for the other.

Transformation is a process by which cells take up DNA from their environment. For this project, the artificial transformation process of electroporation was utilized in order to transform cells by exposing a mixture of cells and free DNA to a strong electrical field. Bacteria grown to different phases of growth under various conditions were used for electroporation and transformation efficiencies were determined. Trends that were observed included higher transformation efficiencies for the CcdBR stain than the Dh5a strain of E. coli, higher transformation efficiencies for 0.4 OD cultures than for 0.2 OD cultures, and no significant effect of the media type on transformation efficiencies. Standard deviations were too large for these results to be conclusive.

Year of Submission

2007

Department

Department of Biology

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

8-2006

Object Description

1 PDF file (21 pages)

Download

Comments?

Share

COinS