Effect of Temperature on Mung Bean Growth Rate

Abstract

With the rise of average global temperatures, its effects on plant growth should be further examined as plants are an integral part of life by providing oxygen, nutrients as food, and even shelter, to name a few (World of Change: Global Temperatures). Temperature is one of the primary factors in plant development, and as such we aimed to examine the effect of temperature on the growth rate of mung beans as they are a common food in diets throughout Asia. Previous research has shown that increasing mean temperatures increased the rate of growth in mung beans, given that the temperatures were not greatly exceeding 28° C (Aggarwal et al., 1977). Thus, we hypothesized that there would be a difference in mung bean growth dependent on temperature, with the warmer environment yielding the fastest rate due to hotter temperatures, allowing the seed coating to tear and embryos within to plump out. Using three different environments (cold 3° Celsius, room temperature 25° C , and warmer 30° C), we placed mung beans in plastic ziploc bags and observed their growth over the span of 10 days. Each day, a ruler and string were used to measure the mung beans from the different environments and the data was recorded into three tables, one for each environment (see Appendix A). Growth of the sprouts ranged from 0cm - 20cm, and average growth for the warmer environment was 17.33cm, 14.67cm for the room temperature environment, and 0.067 for the cold environment. Taking the averages of growth in each environment, a one way ANOVA test was used and the variation between the three groups were deemed to be statistically significant (p-palue=0.0001,⍺=0.05). Our findings agreed with previous research and we rejected the null hypothesis. The growth rate of mung beans was fastest in the warmer environment, with the optimal temperature ranging from 26 - 33° C for our particular experiment. Limitations may have included uneven distribution of water per mung bean, nonuniform temperature per bean as some beans may have been <1cm farther from the heat source than others, and space limitations for each mung bean to properly grow.