This week we started on the initial steps of our mouse stem cell project. We were given a lesson on how to extract the media from our cells and how to put new media back in (shown in the photo). It was extremely cool to watch how to properly deal with the stem cells in order to make sure we don't kill them.
My partner and I's plan for our experiment is to do 6 trials for half of a week each. Three of our trials are going to be done with pure ethanol and the other three are going to be done with alcoholic beverages. For each trial the amount of ethanol or alcoholic beverage will be increased each time to see how different levels of alcohol affect the mouse fat cells.
Our research question is, what are the effects of alcohol on mouse fat cells? We chose this for our research because while we were deciding what to experiment with my partner saw that alcohol increases the size of fat cells. We then decided to see if pure ethanol (alcohol) would increase the size of the fat cells as well or if there was something in the alcoholic beverages that contributed to the increase in size of the fat cells.
Overall we haven't had many challenges. The biggest struggle we had though was at the very beginning when we were trying to figure out what our experiment should be. We initially wanted to try and degrade fat cells but, after doing some research we found that fat cells do not ever completely go away. They just get smaller and smaller in order to still store energy. Since we couldn't degrade them we decided we wanted to grow them instead.
The very first step in starting our project was creating our project proposals. When looking at the critique we were given, the only thing we really needed to fix was to be more descriptive with our sample size and to better explain why our safety concerns mattered. Both of our changes were made on the final draft.
My partner and I's plan for our experiment is to do 6 trials for half of a week each. Three of our trials are going to be done with pure ethanol and the other three are going to be done with alcoholic beverages. For each trial the amount of ethanol or alcoholic beverage will be increased each time to see how different levels of alcohol affect the mouse fat cells.
Our research question is, what are the effects of alcohol on mouse fat cells? We chose this for our research because while we were deciding what to experiment with my partner saw that alcohol increases the size of fat cells. We then decided to see if pure ethanol (alcohol) would increase the size of the fat cells as well or if there was something in the alcoholic beverages that contributed to the increase in size of the fat cells.
Overall we haven't had many challenges. The biggest struggle we had though was at the very beginning when we were trying to figure out what our experiment should be. We initially wanted to try and degrade fat cells but, after doing some research we found that fat cells do not ever completely go away. They just get smaller and smaller in order to still store energy. Since we couldn't degrade them we decided we wanted to grow them instead.
The very first step in starting our project was creating our project proposals. When looking at the critique we were given, the only thing we really needed to fix was to be more descriptive with our sample size and to better explain why our safety concerns mattered. Both of our changes were made on the final draft.