Give background information on both bacteria and all three antibiotics; write about what is already known about them in the research literature.
What is left unanswered and what is the significance of your experiment?
4. Materials and Methods
Explain the procedure so someone who needs to repeat this experiment clearly understands all the steps (replications included) and will be able to repeat it in the same exact way.
Written in paragraph form. Do not use bullet points!
Do not list all the materials one by one include them in your procedure description (leave out the unnecessary details).
Specify all materials, reagents & organisms and add their source (manufacturer/catalog number). Mention what concentrations were used.
Include the controls that were used and explain why they were used.
Explain how data was collected.
Explain how data analysis was done (including the statistics).
Written in passive voice and past tense (e.g. Plates were incubated at …)
Italicize species names, e.g. Staphylococcus aureus.
5. Results
Write a summary paragraph emphasizing important patterns or trends that can be seen in your tables and graphs (do not list one by one all of the results from your tables and graphs).
State whether increase or decrease in specific values was recorded but do not explain or discuss why you got those particular findings, do not draw major conclusions (leave that for the Discussion section).
Present your data (illustrate your findings) in the form of tables and figures. Throughout the text refer the reader to see the appropriate figures and tables by inserting (Figure 1) or (Fig. 2A), or (Table 1) at the end of the sentence in which you mention them, or by inserting as seen in Fig. 1. in the text. One of the figures should show a photo of the Gram stained bacteria, both S. enteritidis and S. aureus (individual cells, not clumps of Gram stain), and the other figure should show a graph that displays data from the table. Your table should show averages and standard deviations for each of the treatments. Check with your lab instructor whether or not you need to include all of the measurements in this table.