Photos from the 2003 East Tennessee Collegiate Division Meeting of the Tennessee Academy of Science held at Pellissippi State Technical Community College
4/11/2003
Jennifer Bradley, Carson Newman
Third Place Outstanding Undergraduate Presentation
ABSTRACT
Determining the Most Accurate and Best-designed Fecal Coliform Test for Use by Middle and High Schools
The Izaac Walton Clean Water Center in Knoxville, Tennessee is working with area middle and high school science teachers to teach them ways to introduce their students to watershed monitoring. Current tests that teachers are conducting with their students are water pH, hardness, and dissolved oxygen. Teachers may soon perform fecal coliform tests with their students. A variety of fecal coliform testing kits is available for determining if there has been fecal contamination of a water source. The purpose of this study is to find an inexpensive, easy to use, and accurate fecal coliform testing kit. Two inexpensive fecal coliform testing kits, Coliscan Easygel and Bacterial Pollution of Water, were compared against a Membrane Filtration method, m-ColiBlue24. Coliscan Easygel was found to be the better test: results were easy to interpret, and they were consistent with Membrane Filtration results. The Bacterial Pollution of Water test was difficult to prepare and yielded incomplete and poor results.
