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Fungi Lab Report

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Fungi Growth
Introduction
All humans have come into contact with some form of fungi at some point in their lives. Sometimes fungi produce large mushroom like structures, or sometimes they just appear as small wisps of hair. But with so many different forms and variations of fungi, sometimes they become hard to classify, and there is confusion as to whether it maybe a plant or bacteria. Buckholz et al (2016) state that the fungal kingdom deserves to be neither a prokaryote not a plant. Fungi are eukaryotic organisms that contain a membrane bound nucleus. They are also heterotrophic and consume their carbon. The main difference between animals and fungi is that fungi perform their digestion externally (Buckholz et al. 2016). This leads to the importance of fungi: decomposing. Fungi maintain crucial processes in terrestrial ecosystems as decomposers of dead plant tissues and mutualistic partners of almost all terrestrial multicellular organisms (Heilmann-Clausen et al. 2015). Without fungi, …show more content…

We dipped the forceps in isopropyl alcohol to sterilize them. Then we quickly opened the petri dishes, inserted the substrate, and reclosed them to avoid contamination from airborne particles. To keep the environment moist, we added 1 mL of water to the petri dish. We shook the tube to ensure that we received an adequate number of spores. Using a micropipette, we took 50 microliters of each species of fungi: Aspergillus niger, Rhizopus stolonifer, and Penicillium chrysogenum. Each fungus was placed onto the orange peel in the petri dish. We then sealed each of the petri dishes with parafilm, taped them together, and then placed them in an incubator at 25°C. The samples remained in there for 1 week. After the week, we took them out of the incubator, and making sure not to open them, we observed the growth of each fungus. All of the petri dishes and samples were then disposed

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