Chook Me!

How to check the effect of temperature on unripe bananas?

I AM DOING RESEARCH ON HOW TEMPERATURE AFFECTS RIPENING OF UNRIPE BANANAS SO FAR I BELIEVE USING 20-100`C FRIFGE AND INCUBATOR, CAMERA MASHING THE BANANA DOING BENDICTS TEST USING COLORIMETER TO MEASURE SUGAR ABSORBANCE PLIZ HELP ON A GOOD METHOD i need to give a presentation portfolio in class using all biological techniques act like a real biologists, a few tips will be nice

Public Comments

1. buy 12 nannas , pre heat household oven to it's 2lowest degree one pre heated to lowest % put nana in and time to when unripened skin starts to "change color"nanna too ripe. then calculate time of discoloration/as from pr eheat to placeing nanna in oven/average of both start of pre heat and discoloration on skin divid by one third should give a approximation off between .1.5 &0.05 of a ripened nanna.
2. It really depends what level you are doing this work at - ie. school? college? and what resources you'd have available, but anyway going by the details in your question: 1) bendicts test sounds like a v good one to use to me as banannas are v good fruits at turning starch into sugar as an indicator of ripeness (ie. unripe banannas contain v little sugar and ripe ones contain a lot!) 2) I wouldn't personally use cameras or mashing as tests - they are too difficult to compair (though this obiously depends on what your teacher wants you to do), but photos are good things to add in to a report, and esp. for a presentation - real scientists do this a lot too, infact where I work we used to employ a part time photographer to do this for us until funding was reduced! 3) Watch out for the temperatures that you're using - anything above about 45 at the most will cook and kill the bananna rather than helping it to ripen, I'd also do some colder than 20, as this is quite warm - though too cold might mean that the bananna takes longer than you have for your experiment! Go down as far as 5 or 10 degrees. 4) This is the bit that to be honest I hate! but it has to be done - planning is v important in science! You need to decide how many banannas you need and how you are going to be sure that they all start off at the same ripeness. Say you've got 2 weeks and want to test at 5 different temps - maybe you'd test a bananna from each group every 3 days - you'd need at least 4 bannanas in each temp + one extra incase of mistakes, so total of 25 banannas - work it out in that kinda way. 5) Make sure no other factors come in to it - eg. anything else can affect ripening - guess the best thing to do would be to put each group in a cardboard box to stop light getting in or anything like that. Hope some of that helps a bit - feel free to email me if you need some more help - sounds like a good project - good luck with it x