The effects of glucose concentration on the glucose-induced chemotaxis of Tetrahymena thermophila

Abstract

Tetrahymena thermophila is a free-living, unicellular eukaryote (Collins & Gorovsky, 2005) that lives in freshwater environments, using its cilia to move through water and sweep food into its oral grooves (Bozzone, 2000). Chemotaxis is the movement of an organism in response to a chemical gradient of a particular substance. The glucose-induced chemotaxis of T. thermophila was investigated to identify which concentration of glucose solution elicited the greatest chemotactic response. T. thermophila were starved and incubated at 25 °C for 24 hours. After the starvation phase, T. thermophila were cultured in 1x10-1 M and 1x10-6 M glucose solutions for 5 and 30 minutes. Following fixation of the cells using IKI, the cells in each replicate were counted using a haemocytometer. A one-way ANOVA test was conducted for both time trials with the glucose concentration as the factor, which obtained p-values that were statistically insignificant. Therefore, the concentration of glucose solution does not have a statistically significant effect on T. thermophila’s chemotaxis. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that the concentration of glucose will not affect the chemotaxis of T. thermophila.