Photo by V. Miller
Aug. 23, 2006
Cloning Potatoes
Effects of Various Nutrient Concentrations on the Cloning of the Eye of the Solanum tuberosum at Multiple Stages
Neela Thangada, 14, San Antonio, Texas
Top Young Scientist of the Year, Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge, 2005
Project background: After reading about a potato-cloning experiment in a biology textbook, Neela set out to explore plant cloning. She wanted to find out how different nutrient concentrations affected the early stages of growth in a potato.
Tactics and results: Neela removed 60 shoot tips growing from potatoes. She sterilized the tips and cut off the bottom two segments of each tip. She placed each tip in a test tube that contained a half-strength or full-strength nutrient solution. Then, she incubated the test tubes. She hypothesized that the tips in the full-strength solution would grow better than those in the half-strength solution. During her first trial, all the samples became contaminated. So, Neela redid the entire experiment.
Neela confirmed her hypothesis. The potato tips in the full-strength nutrient solution grew better.
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