The riper the fruit, the faster it stimulates ripening?

Question

how can i design a lab to test this statment? i need to incorporate the knowledge of the plant hormone ethylene and testing the concentration of ethylene using bromine

Answer 1

One way to test this statement would be to have three sets of treatments (each replicate in a paper bag):

Ripening Treatment 1: green banana + very ripe banana

Ripening Treatment 2: green banana + intermediately ripe banana

Control: green banana + green banana

For each treatment, you would have multiple bags (so that you had replication), and you would also want to mark (e.g., with a colored string on the "handle") the focal green banana in each bag.

Then, you would simply compare ripening rates (presumably on an ordinal scale) of the focal green bananas as a function of their treatment. To get a quantitative score, you could also test the concentration of ethylene of the focal (initially green) bananas at the end of the experiment.

Simple one-way ANOVAs should suffice for analyses in this case, although you would need to be able to do post-hoc comparisons if you found a significant effect overall.