Neela plays sports and reads voraciously. Her future career? "I have wanted to be a professor of medicine since age five."
Inspired by a biology textbook's idea of a potato cloning experiment, Neela set out to explore plant cloning. She wanted to determine how different nutrient concentrations affected the multiple stages of growth in a potato.
Neela removed 60 shoot tips growing from potatoes. After sterilizing the tips, she excised the bottom two segments, the meristem and primordial. She placed each in a test tube of half-strength or full-strength nutrient solution and incubated them. During her first trial, all the samples became contaminated. Neela persevered and redid the entire experiment, finding that the potato clones did indeed grow better in the full-strength solution.
