The effect of temperature on growth rate for wild-type and mutant Tetrahymena thermophila

Abstract

Tetrahymena thermophila is a motile eukaryote that has been broadly studied due to the fact that it exhibits dimorphism (two nuclei), and is also studied for cilia biogenesis. In this study, the main objective was to compare the population sizes of the wild-type and low vacuole mutant strains of T. thermophila under a variety of different temperatures. Our goal was to observe whether the mutation or temperature was responsible for varying population sizes. We failed to reject all three of our null hypotheses as all of our p-values were > 0.05 (0.77, 0.30, and 0.40 respectively); failing to support our predictions that temperature would have an effect on the growth rate of T. thermophila. Our data did support our prediction that the presence of the mutation did not have an effect on population size.