Tetrahymena Lab Report

Henriquetta Saba
Paul Samipla
Bio 1130
28 November 2014

Phagocytosis in Tetrahymena; Food Choice
Abstract
Tetrahymena, a ciliated protozoan, possess many characteristics that makes it the perfect organism for the study of cells (Bonzzone, 2000). Tetrahymena can be obtained easily, and are often used to explore organelle structure, cell morphology, ciliary motion, and cell function and cell behaviors (Wheat-ley et al. 1994). The specific focus of our experiment was to examine the activity of phagocytosis and vacuole formation in Tetrahymena. This process was visualized by feeding methylene blue stained yeast cells and India ink to Tetrahymena (Keenan, 1984). In this experiment,
Based on the graphs displaying the number of vacuoles formed in presence of the yeast cells within the yeast and ink mixture, our null hypothesis was rejected because both the yeast cells and India ink had a significant effect on the tetrahymena as illustrated by the number of vacuoles that were form when those two substances were fed to the tetrahymena. One factor from the results that was particularly surprising was that the number of vacuoles formed as a result of both the yeast cells and India ink decreased at the 30 minute mark to 6 vacuoles for India ink and 5 vacuoles for yeast cells. We assumed that number of vacuoles would continue to increase as time went on. However, despite the expected results of the experiment being reflected by figure 3, some errors were noted. For example, at the start of the experiment, we had trouble locating the vacuoles within the tetrahymena and may have miscounted the final number of vacuoles because of equipment failure. Due to this error, the data collected in this experiment cannot be used for analysis in regards to research purposes. This error might have due to human related errors such as improper cleaning of the microscope that were used in this experiment. However, since the experiment yielded the
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