Question

Three cells with generation times of 60 minutes are inoculated into a culture medium. how many cells are there after 5 hours? three cells with generation times of 60 minutes are inoculated into a culture medium. how many cells are there after 5 hours? 15 180 900 32 96

Answer 1

The answer is 96.
Generation time is the time taken for a population to double it's population. It is denoted by the formula G =t/n. Therefore to find the number of generations that will have occurred after 5 hrs we get 60 = (5*60)/n. n = 300/60 = 5
Then we will use the exponential growth formula ; Nt = No x 2^n
Nt = 3 * 2^5 = 96
Nt = 96

Answer 2

96. Cells regenerates every hour which means cell doubles its number each hour. In this problem we have 5 hours so the number of cells for each hour will be doubled. Therefore to solve the problem we should follow the n = 3*2^5. Then we can have 96 as answer where 3 is the original number of cells and 2 is the doubling of number of cells per hour, 5 is the number of times cells should double.