Growing Fungi for Science Project

You have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to your science fair project, however, growing fungi for science project experiments can be both fun and profitable. The most lucrative fungi projects in the world are mushroom projects. These projects will not only help you to learn about fungi and how they grow and reproduce, but they can also help you to make a little extra money on the side.

Experiment with Microbes coming from the faucet in your home. How is your home?

The DNA Extraction has assisted many students to win 1st prize at their science fair. Check it out.

Growing fungi for science project ideas can be developed using what you already know about fungi as well as using pre-existing data on fungi. However, the easiest projects to execute are the ones based on simply growing mushroom. Since some mushrooms are poisonous and some are edible, the safest way to get all the supplies you need to grow mushrooms, as well as to get a predetermined starter colony, mushroom growing kits work great.

The first variable that you can manipulate when experimenting with your mushrooms is the growing medium. Using an edible mushroom colony, like Shitake, see how growing the Shitakes in different mediums affects the size of the colony, the physical appearance of the mushroom and the mushroom's taste. The most common growing mediums for mushrooms include sawdust agar, oat agar, corn meal agar and potato dextrose agar. If you buy a mushroom growing kit, it will contain the recommended growing medium. This can be your control experiment. Once your control experiment has developed you can remove clusters to grow a new colony in other growing mediums.

Temperature is another variable that you can manipulate when growing fungi for science project. Each mushroom species has its own set temperature range that it needs to develop and reproduce. Shitakes, for example, prefer temperatures between 50 and 80 degrees F. Others will prefer cooler temperatures and some will prefer hotter temperatures.

The third variable you can manipulate in your microbiology science fair projects that involve mushrooms is the location of your mushroom garden. You can grow mushrooms outside or inside. If you grow your mushrooms outside you will need to take extra steps to make sure the mushrooms are not contaminated or starved to death. Outside mushroom experiments are more difficult to control, but they can produce very interesting results. They can also develop a renewable supply of mushrooms for eating, selling and experimenting with.

There are a lot of microbiology science fair experiments that you can complete. You can examine the cellular structure of your mushrooms, you can compare the spoors of one mushroom species to another or you can simply compare how fungi cellular structure differ from conifer cellular structure or even animal cellular structure. The key to winning a science fair project with a mushroom experiment is to make it interesting, to present facts about mushrooms that are intriguing and little known, and to provide edible samples for the judges to test.