More than half the population of all the developing nations in the world depends on agriculture or farming for survival and for at least two meals a day. Typically, these small-scale farmers are given very little land to sustain their entire families, making it paramount that their land is used as efficiently as possible. My project utilizes the process of polyploidy through exposure to colchicine to optimize crop growth for any use, small-scale or commercial. Polyploidy is the process in which an abnormal number of chromosomes result from specialized cellular replication through a mutation. These rapid changes have proven to be advantageous to plants, enhancing their traits leading to positive effects on the rates of survival and harvest.

The parameters of my project to evaluate success are the specific phenotypic differences between the control group and colchicine group through height and leaf widths among different trials to see how notably they have been enhanced. The enhanced plants will hopefully result in traits that allow for better survival and growth. My goal is to produce altered organisms, which have significant signs of faster growth and yield.

There are several steps in my project, which required several different methods. The first step was to grow and sustain the plants in their ideal conditions, then expose pea plant(Pisum sativum) seeds to the optimal concentration of colchicine to allow for growth without killing the seeds completely, collecting data in the form of quantitative phenotypic measurements(height and leaf width), and to karyotype my pea plants and onion plants(Allium cepa) using an aceto-orcein stain as a reference to verify that their chromosome numbers did indeed change due to the colchicine exposure.

The types of data I collected are the mean plant heights and mean plant lead widths along with the ploidy levels of all the organisms. The means of these plant growth data sets shower me that initially, both the control and colchicine plants demonstrated similar growth, however, the colchicine plants grew significantly more in both height and leaf width by the end of the trials. In the end, the control plants grew to an average of 10 cm in height and 0.75 cm in leaf width. In addition to the growth data, my karyotypes serve to provide evidence of the altered number of chromosomes. The karyotype image for my control plants contains 2n diploid cells. The karyotype images for my colchicine plants shows a significant difference in the chromosome numbers, containing both 3n and 1n cells. The results were statistically significant as all conditions were kept the same for the two groups and there was little error between the trials.

I can conclude from my experiment that the colchicine did have a positive effect on the growth of my plants, and the goal of significantly faster growth was reached, however without the observation of actual vegetables, the increase in yield was undetermined. Ultimately, my project was successful in showing that colchicine does in-fact augment the growth rates in pea plants and, speculatively, in other similar crop plants.