| Directions for Bacterial Conjugation Lab Report Report: Your report should take the form of a “partial formal lab report”. Specifically, this report should include the following: -An Abstract of 200 words or less that summarizes the goal/ hypothesis, methods, results, and implications/conclusions from this study. This should be a single paragraph. -A Results section that includes your data tables transcribed from your lab notebooks and containing predictions and observations (with table numbers and captions), and a brief written summary highlighting the results that you want the reader to notice – but without interpreting what the results mean. You may also include photos of your plates, but this is not required. If you include photos, photos must be labeled with Figure numbers and descriptive captions that allow the reader to understand what is being shown, whether the plate labels and presence/absence of colonies can be clearly read in the photo or not. -A Discussion section that draws a conclusion regarding the original goal/hypothesis, and describes your reasoning from question to results to conclusion. This is where interpretation of the results occurs. In other words, the discussion should be an argument marshalling support for your conclusions (not necessarily for your initial hypothesis) based on the results of the experiment. If you did not get results, or if your own results are contradictory, you may take class results into consideration. However, you should speculate on why you did not get results or you should describe how your results are contradictory and what might have caused the conflicting results. Be more specific than “mistakes were made”. Consider the possibility that mistakes were not made, or were not made by you. **Important Hints: Read over the Bacterial Conjugation Handout that you followed for this lab, and try to answer the questions that are there for you. In particular, discuss which stain was the donor and whether genes transferred during conjugation came from the plasmid or chromosome; explain how you came to this conclusion from the evidence. |
