Biology EE topic - is this strong enough?

[wannabecowboy]

Is trying to isolate an antibiotic producer from a local soil sample and then testing its effectiveness on a nonpathogenic bacteria a good EE idea? Or instead of testing it drying to identitify using various tests? Is it strong enough to write an EE on? Also does this fit into the IB ethic guidelines?

[ChocolateAndVanilla]

11 hours ago, wannabecowboy said:

Is trying to isolate an antibiotic producer from a local soil sample and then testing its effectiveness on a nonpathogenic bacteria a good EE idea? Or instead of testing it drying to identitify using various tests? Is it strong enough to write an EE on? Also does this fit into the IB ethic guidelines?

I'm pretty sure it fits all the ethical guidelines, you could actually even do it on pathogenic bacteria.

Sounds good to me, what substance do you want to isolate? (just curiosity 😄)

[wannabecowboy]

9 hours ago, ChocolateAndVanilla said:

I'm pretty sure it fits all the ethical guidelines, you could actually even do it on pathogenic bacteria.

Sounds good to me, what substance do you want to isolate? (just curiosity 😄)

I'm not sure yet, but hopefully I want to isolate and identify at least one, and possible test the effectiveness against a conventional antibiotic or sanitiser.  

Also, would this be an ok research question?

How are antibiotics derived from producers in a local sample of soil effective in comparison to conventional antibiotics?

[PaulaSunflower]

On 1/6/2021 at 4:16 PM, wannabecowboy said:

Is trying to isolate an antibiotic producer from a local soil sample and then testing its effectiveness on a nonpathogenic bacteria a good EE idea? Or instead of testing it drying to identitify using various tests? Is it strong enough to write an EE on? Also does this fit into the IB ethic guidelines?

Hii, first of all sorry for my english it's not my first language. My EE was quite simmilar, it was about the efficacy of hand sanitizer on "Escherichia coli", depending on its concentration of alcohol. You can use or test on bacterias but if i remember it well it had to be inoffesinve bacterias, those kind that you could find easily, i'm not really sure if this is written in somewhere but my supervisor was quite tough with this (it's not the same if you use bacterias that can really affect you than if you use bacterias that you are in contact with daily). I can assure you it's a good EE idea and it's strong enough as i got almost an A (just for one point!! hahaha). Besides the calculs and all the procedures weren't really "complicated" so I think it's really attainable. The only thing is that you will have to work quite a lot in the lab because you will need to do some repetitions (it doesn't matter how you will focus it, you will have to do it) and it doesn't look like a lot but i can assure you that you will need many afternoons.

[PaulaSunflower]

On 1/7/2021 at 2:32 PM, wannabecowboy said:

I'm not sure yet, but hopefully I want to isolate and identify at least one, and possible test the effectiveness against a conventional antibiotic or sanitiser.  

Also, would this be an ok research question?

How are antibiotics derived from producers in a local sample of soil effective in comparison to conventional antibiotics?

hii again, just one more advice. You have to be realistic and i don't know the equipment you have in your school but identify a bacteria is not that easy, futhermore, doing just that it won't take a lot of space in your ee so if you want to concentrate in doing only that, maybe you should explain and study different methods. For this reason, I recommend you to be very specific in what you would like to do it because they will apreciate more if you work in one theme deeply than if you explore different stuff superficially. So if I were you, I would do just one thing (isolate and identify bacterias with differents methods or test the effectiveness against antibiotic/sanitiser) and I would go through every detail and make sure that everything is explained well.