Abstract
Methods/Materials
Due to the complexity of creating a bacterial environment with a wide range of food concentrations, a bacterium was modeled using an autonomous robot created with the Arduino platform and programmed in Python. The modeled environment contained a dynamic gradient of light levels that represented food concentrations in a bacterial environment.
Results
Findings show chemotaxis movement performs better than completely random movement by an average of 57 percent. Furthermore, checking food concentration levels every 0.5 seconds was the optimal frequency and resulted in the highest average light level. Additionally, external disturbances caused detrimental effects on collecting light for the chemotaxis movement while having minimal effects on the completely random movement.
Conclusions/Discussion
This model demonstrates that random movements are not completely random: there is a clear evolutionary benefit of chemotaxis movement and the frequent checking of concentration levels.
The completely random movement and chemotaxis movement of bacteria were modeled and compared utilizing an autonomous robot programmed in Python.
Science Fair Project done By Kenny Z. Lei