Question

Gene choice: P53

Describe an experiment that you could use to determine if a new cancer drug works to combat this cancer. Be sure to include details such as the experimental method, the independent variable, dependent variable, and control variables.

Answer 1

Requirements -

Liquid mammalian culture medium

Cancerous mammalian cells

Orbital Shaker

spectrophotometer

Newly discovered drug, X

Distilled water

Procedure -

1. Prepare stock solution of the newly discovered drug and perform its different dilution. Say, stock is 10%, prepare 0.05, 0.1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%.

2. In liquid mammalian cell culture medium, incubate 1 microlitre of cancerous mammalian cells. Put this conical flask in an orbital Shaker overnight.

3. Remove the conical flask from the orbital Shaker in the morning and now take 1 ml of this media and add 9 ml of freshly prepared same media so that it gets diluted 10 times.

4. Now Plate 1 microlitre of the diluted cell solution prepared in step 3 to a suitable mammalian cell culture medium. Prepare many such plates. Incubate them for 3 to 4 days.

5. You have various concentrations of the newly discovered drug as pee step number 1. Now incubate 10 micro litres of each of these tubes of different concentration to each of the cell culture plates prepared in step number 4. So, that in the end you have 7 plates (0.05, 0.1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%).

6. Incubate each of the plate for 2 to 3 days and then observe after an interval of of 2-2 days.

Results and discussions

If you are able to see lumps of cells growing on the plate, then that newly discovered drug is not inhibiting the growth of cancerous cells. But if you are not able to see lumps of cells on the plate, then the newly discovered drug is successful in controlling the growth of cancerous cells. Also you need to determine the percentage of drug at which it is able to control the growth of cancerous cells because not all concentrations of the drug would be effective in controlling cancer.

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