Limiting Factor Lab Report

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Limiting factors are components or conditions of an environment that prevent a population from continually growing. Nutrients are one type of limiting factor that can affect the growth of a population. Bacteria, for example, are unable to synthesize fundamental chemical elements necessary for growth, therefore, they rely on their environment to provide these important factors. While the bacteria are growing, they are using up the supply of available elements, and as growth continues, the element that is present in the lowest concentration related to the demand will eventually run out causing the bacteria to stop growing. Environmental factors can also limit the growth of a population. Bacteria are sensitive to the pH of their environment and if the pH is not within the optimal range for growth, bacteria may stop growing. …show more content…

This was accomplished by preparing tubes of complex media with different concentrations of glucose and buffer and inoculating the tubes with E. faecalis. E. faecalis bacteria use the glycolytic pathway to ferment sugar in order to obtain energy. As a byproduct of fermentation, two molecules of acid are released for each molecule of sugar that is processed. The absorbance of each tube was recorded over a 5 hour period to determine the amount of bacterial growth. The generation time (g) was calculated in order to determine the rate of growth. I hypothesized that increasing the concentration of glucose in the medium would increase the amount of growth and decrease the generation time of E. faecalis. Therefore, I predicted that the inoculated tube containing the highest concentration of glucose would have the highest final absorbance value and lowest g

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