Conclusion

The purpose of my project is to see what type of metal door handles, circular or rectangular bacteria thrive on. To find this, I first got some Petree dishes (i made sure to sterilize them first and after the research, I quickly killed them using a bleach and water solution) and I got a swab and I swabbed ten circular doorknobs, and ten rectangular doorknobs, each coming from the middle school/elementary and high school. The doorknobs that had the most bacteria overall were the circular doorknobs with a total amount of forty-six bacterial colonies and a total amount of bacterial colonies on the rectangular doorknob was 38.

I think these results came out the way they did because the circular doorknobs in the middle/elementary school are touched more and it has people there too. Also in the high school, there are some doors that are rarely used probably contributing to the outcome. Something else that probably contributed to the outcome of my project is that when I was swabbing the doors I had to walk a little way to put the swabs in the Petri dish, during those few seconds, the swab could have picked up some of the bacteria on the way so that could have probably changed the results. Finding the number of bacteria on different kinds of doorknobs can help hospitals chose the right doorknobs to get so they do not have to worry about a lot of bacteria traveling, especially since the Covid-19 outbreak.

Future research needs to go into more types of doorknobs and different types of metal to have a more accurate finding, and to give hospitals more options to use.