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Organic vs. Regular Chicken and Bacteria Science Fair Projects

Wear Gloves When Working on Organic vs. Regular Chicken and Bacteria Science Fair Projects
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How quickly does bacteria grow on organic chicken meat
compared to regular chicken meat?

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Chicken Handling Instructions

To prevent the spread of organic contaminants when working with raw chicken meat you need to wear latex / rubber gloves. You will also need to wash everything that comes into contact with the raw meat and its packaging with soap and water.

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Test bacteria on any surface with the Surface Microbes Science Fair Projects Kit: after hand sanitizer, hands, disinfectant.. for example. You can use antibiotics to test the bacteria too.

Anytime you want to test how many bacteria are On Top of a surface like a desk, skin, chicken, computer keyboard, bread dough, a hard piece of chocolate, cheese, inside of an animal's cheek, etc. then use the surface experimenter kit. The kit will let you calculate how many bacteria there are per unit surface area on the object. You can also test for e-coli, however, only the microbe water kit will let you distinguish e. coli from other coliforms and bacteria.

 

Objectives/Goals

The goals of these studies were
1.to determine whether antibiotic resistant bacteria could be isolated from store bought chicken breasts,
2.to determine whether organic products had less antibiotic resistant bacteria than nonorganic chickens

Methods/Materials

Two different types of organic and nonorganic chicken were swabbed, the resultant bacteria were incubated overnight and streaked on agar plates, with and without five different antibiotics to determine whether any organisms in the population were antibiotic resistant.

Results

1. No bacteria grew on the control plates, where samples from the chicken were not applied to the agar, but because all other variable were held constant, I can conclude all bacteria arose from the surface of the chickens.
2. Antibiotic resistant bacteria were isolated from the surface of each chicken.
3. The organic chicken samples had a smaller range of antibiotic resistant strains and fewer colonies than samples from nonorganic chickens.
4. Bacteria resistant to ampicillin, kanamycin, streptomycin, and tetracycline were observed. No bacterium isolated was resistant to chloramphenicol.

Conclusions/Discussion

I could conclude that all bacteria observed on the plates arose from the bacteria because nothing grew on the control plates. More antibiotic resistant bacteria was isolated from nonorganic chicken than the organic saples, and they were resistant to a wider range of antibiotics. Even though I do not know which, if any, antibiotics were given to the chickens used in this study, ampicillin, kanamycin, streptomycin, and tetracycline are routinely included in chicken feed. In my limited research, I could not find any example of chloramphenicol being included in chicken feed. In this study, bacteria were found resistant to all antibiotics with the exception of chloramphenicol. A interesting correlation. 3rd party contributor


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Chicken experiments can be based on live chickens or chicken meat as long as you are not cruel to the animals.