School students may be thinking of many things for a project. You might buy motors and lights and think about how to do it, but a science project is not just about machines and engineering, it's also about plants and animals.
There are so many projects that simply think and make others
think. When this is done and demonstrated, it is a scientific curiosity. There
is so much to project in botany and so much to study.
There are botanical
projects that you can easily do at home and explain, but what seems simple when
you look at it, is more useful when you explain it. That's the project about
ethylene gas because ethylene gas ripens the fruit so we may wonder what we
should do with that ethylene gas.
There is a simple explanation for that in our house.
Generally, when fruits are ripening, ethylene gas is released and other fruits
can be ripened by using it. It is a process of thinking with what we have.
Various hormones are produced in plants and various gases are
also released. What we generally know is that plants take in carbon dioxide gas
and release oxygen during the day and take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide
during the night.
This is what we generally know about gases released by
plants, but plants and their organs can emit different types of gases. Let us
know a little about ethylene, a gaseous plant hormone released by plants, especially fruits.
Ethylene hormone
Ethylene is a gaseous hormone. It generally plays an
important role in fruit ripening and ripening. Fruits like apples, bananas, and watermelons produce more ethylene when they ripen.
This ethylene gas encourages the ripening of fruits and the ageing of
leaves and flowers of plants. Ethylene gas removes the dormancy of buds and
seeds. Ethylene gas is commonly called a growth inhibitor gas because it
inhibits the growth of roots and stems of plants.
We can learn about how this ethylene gas encourages fruit
ripening through a recipe.
These types of recipes are very simple. This can be learned
at the school level and done at home by students and given a botanical explanation
at school science fairs.
Step1:
First, take two tomato pods. Put it in a plastic bag put a
ripe banana along with it and cover the top well.
Step2:
Put only two unripe tomatoes in another plastic bag and cover
the top of it.
Step3:
The next day we see that the tomato pods in the bag
containing bananas and tomatoes are ripe but the tomatoes in the bag containing
only tomato pods are unripe and green.
The reason
A banana placed in a ripe tomato releases ethylene gas as it ripens. Ethylene gas is normally released during fruit ripening.
Especially when bananas ripen, they release more ethylene
gas. Along with that, tomato pods will start ripening soon but the bag
containing only tomato pods will not have much gas so it will be in an unripe
state the information about this ethyl gas and the information that this
gas will help ripen the fruits can be explained through this method.
Common usage
Ethylene is widely used for ripening of fruits in the world.
Generally, if the fruits are harvested after ripening on the tree it is not very
large so the fruits are harvested before ripening.
Fruits harvested before ripening begin to ripen when the fruit is exposed to ethylene gas before being transported for sale. After that, all the fruits are sold in bulk. Such ethyl is used to ripen fruits.
Unripe fruits
can be ripened by keeping already ripe fruits.