Artifacts

Pictured here is a snippet of a project that my fellow Health Science Scholar and Biomedical Science major peer, Luke Pepperney, and I completed in our Honors Biology 1114 class. In the lab section of this course, it was our goal to impose a research study on organisms called endophytes. Endophytes are symbiotic fungi living among the flesh of plant tissue that contribute to the overall health of the plant. Luke and I chose bananas as our sample specimen and the result of our cultures of various fruit tissue are pictured above.

The nature of this class is very open, thus lending our scientific minds free reign in terms of imposed trials. Luke and I focused our project on identifying the species of endophytic fungi based on bananas of varying ripeness as this would provide insight on the implications of banana fruit rotting. Diving into this project with my peer was a very fruitful experience that induced great scientific rationalization, basic laboratory techniques and methods, as well as an introduction to writing academic science literature.