Emily Davis and Allison Hopkins Project Design

Occupation: Molecular Biologists

Project Design:
Restate your Essential Question
Essential Question: What is the best way to cleanse your hands from bacteria?
Restate your Hypothesis
Emilys Hypothesis: I believe that the best way to cleanse your hands from bacteria is to use
some brand-name hand sanitizer when comparing to homemade sanitizer, modern day soap,
or traditional soaps made from fat.
Allisons Hypothesis: I believe that the best way to cleanse your hands from bacteria is to use
brand-name antibacterial soap when comparing to brand-name hand sanitizer, homemade
sanitizer, or traditional soaps made from fat.
What is the
Purpose
of your project?
Purpose: The purpose of this project is to determine what is best to use to cleanse your hands.
It is important because sometimes it is dangerous to not cleanse your hands or use hand
sanitizer that is flammable. By researching this, we will determine if it is necessary to take
these risks and how effective these products really are.
We will take samples of all of these

products, put them on plates and measure the time that it takes to grow bacteria on
them and how much bacteria is able to grow there.
How will your project address your Essential Question?
The experiment that we are conducting will address this question by showing which of
these products is most effective of keeping bacteria off your hands.
How will you design your project to support your Hypothesis?
Since we are testing all of these materials, it will unbiasedly show if my hypothesis is
correct or incorrect.
What is your goal?
My goal is to test these products and then educate people on what they should cleanse
their hands and how far we have come to create good products since using the first
soaps created from fat.
What are the step by step
Procedures
you will take to investigate your Essential
Question?
First what we will do is make our own homemade hand sanitizer and soap. We will then have
someone wash/cleanse their hands one at a time with each product, then touch their finger to
a sterile scientific plate. Then, each day we will look at the plates and determine if they are
growing bacteria. If they are, it will be easy to see little colonies, even without a microscope.
Then we will take a picture and record all of the data we have collected for that day, and at the
end of the experiment we will compare all of the data together.
Why do you choose this investigation?
I chose to do this investigation because there have been studies like this but I was more
interested in testing more varied products together. I was wondering how well soaps have
evolved from traditional soap out of fat and what chemicals cause the difference between a

fatty soap and a modern anti-bacterial soap.

What
Materials
do you need?
The materials we will need are plates, brand-name hand sanitizer, brand-name antibacterial
hand soap, and materials for traditional soap. The materials that we will need for fatty
traditional soap is 9.25 ounces of olive oil, 6 ounces of coconut oil, 4.5 ounces of palm oil, 0.5
ounces of shea butter, 2.9 ounces of lye, and 6.75 ounces of water. We will also need the
materials to make the soap which would be two stainless steel bowls, a pan, a bunsen burner,
a stick blender, a digital scale, a cooking thermometer, a tupperware box for the mold, plastic
or stainless steel spoons, wax paper, and a cardboard box.
What
Safety
precautions do you need to take?
We will need to make sure that there is no open flames anywhere near the plates because the
hand sanitizer is flammable. Other than that, the process is safe to conduct. Then, all we need
to do is make sure that the plates remain untouched so that our data will be truthful.
How will you make your
Observations
and record your data?
We will observe each substance by analyzing it and recording our findings in a notebook daily
and creating a blog. We will also take pictures of each substance daily to visually record our
findings. Since you dont need a microscope to look at bacteria, we can record the data with
just pictures of the plates.
How will you
Analyze
your data?
We will compare all of the data together to find our answer of which product is better to use to
clean your hands of bacteria. Whichever product that has the least amount of bacterial
colonies is the best material to cleanse your hands with.
What do you hope to
Conclude
?
We hope to conclude that our answer supports one of our hypotheses, if our conclusion
supported Emilys hypothesis we would conclude that it is better to use hand sanitizer to clean
your hands of bacteria. If our conclusion supports Allisons hypothesis we would conclude that
it is better to use antibacterial hand soap to cleanse your hands of bacteria.
What will your final product be?
Our final product will include a notebook and blog containing our findings along with pictures
as our visual evidence.
What will you Exhibit on Thursday December 19th?
On exhibition night we will be presenting our project by explaining it to the guests by using
our notebook which contains the daily pictures to show them our process and findings. We
will also have the products that we tested (unused) to show what the products originally were.
The interactive component we will be displaying will contain the use of the plates of each
substance along with the clean substance to have them try and match up which plate has
which substance on it.
Research:
1. Biological molecules can be grouped into Carbohydrates, Lipids, Proteins, and Nucleic
acids.
2. Carbs give people physical and mental energy.
3. Lipids have important structural roles or serve as hormones among other things.
4. Lipids are most familiar as fat.

5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Proteins can be structure, communication, defense, transport, etc.

Nucleic acids, DNA, and RNA, provide the blueprint of life.
Molecular biology is the study of biology at the molecular level.
This field overlaps other areas of biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.
This field focuses with understanding the interactions between the various systems of
the cell, including interactions with DNA, RNA, and proteins, as well as learning how
these interactions are regulated.
10. Researchers have special techniques specific to molecular biology, but often combine
these with techniques and ideas from genetics and biochemistry.
11. Biochemistry is the study of the chemical substances and vital processes occurring in
living organisms.
12. Genetics is the study of the effect of genetic differences on organisms.
13. Molecular biology is the study of the process of replication, transcription, and
translation of the genetic material.
14. Many topics of biology focus on molecules, either directly like cell biology, or indirectly
such as evolutionary biology.
15. The field of molecular biology studies macromolecules and their mechanisms in the
body.
16. Biochemistry has to do more with nutrition, while molecular biology has more to do
with reproduction.
17. Biochemistry emerged as a field earlier in the 20th century.
18. Much of its focus back then was on proteins and enzymes.
19. Major discoveries emerged about DNA and RNA in 1953 when Watson and Crick
discovered the structure of it.
20. Molecular Biology is narrower than looking at life at the molecular level.
21. A macromolecule is a long chain of linked small molecules, which together consist of
thousands to tens of thousands of atoms.
22. Fats and carbs serve mainly as foodstuff and building material.
23. They are made up of small molecules arranged repetitiously.
24. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, RNA stands for ribonucleic acid.
25. DNA and RNA have lots of variety which underlines the diversity of life forms.
26. DNAs backbone is made up of sugar and phosphate.
27. DNAs bases are adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine.
28. Proteins are made up of polypeptide chains, which are long sequences of amino acids.
29. Proteins are more varied than DNA and are more abundant.
30. The most varied or specialized proteins are enzymes which direct almost all chemical
reactions in the body.
31. Monomers are what makes up biomolecules.
32. Lipids are only one monomer, not made up of multiple.
33. DNA is made up of nucleotides.
34. Proteins are made up of amino acids.
35. R group is what differs from the amino acids making up proteins and other amino
acids.

36. Monomers of Carbs are sugars.

37. The way you put together monomers make different structures.
38. Dehydration Synthesis is how you put sugar, amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids
together.
39. Dehydration synthesis is when you form a bond between chemicals but have to take a
water molecule out and add it later.
40. Hydrolysis is the same thing as dehydration synthesis except backwards, it is how to
take apart that bond.
41. The three nucleotides that DNA and RNA are made up of are bases, phosphate, and a
sugar.
42. Bases in RNA are adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil.
43. DNA has a double helix shape, while RNA has half of that.
44. DNA is called antiparallel because one end runs in one direction and the other runs in
the opposite direction.
45. One of the first proteins that scientists discovered the structure was myoglobin.
46. There are 20 amino acids.
47. All amino acids have the same base structure, the only thing that differentiates them
is their side chain, the bond of chemicals it makes off to one side of the chain.
48. All lipids have hydrocarbon tails which is what they all have in common.
49. Because of the tail, they are nonpolar, which means that they don't mix with water,
which explains why fat and water dont mix.
50. Phospholipids are special because half of it is nonpolar, and the other is polar, so one
side is charged.
51. Unsaturated lipids are bent because of a double hydrogen bond, which saturated lipids
are straight.
52. Unsaturated fat is better for your diet.
53. Lipids make up all cell membranes
54. 4typesoflipidscholesterol,fattyacid,triglyceride(reg.fat),andphospholipid(make

membrane)
Summary
Our project will be an experiment conducted over a period of two weeks to prove what
way is best product to cleanse your hands and what molecules are responsible for that.
Timeline
Week of 12/3 - 12/6:
Make soap on 12/5-12/9
Week of 12/9 - 12/13:
Start experiment on 12/11
Record data throughout week
Week of 12/17 - 12/21:
Complete notebook and data on 12/17
Set-up for our exhibit on exhibition night on 12/18
Exhibit all of our work on 12/19