Question

1. In the following experiment, you will test the effect of two different growth factors on the growth of your three cell lines. Please describe an experimental design with appropriate negative controls. Remember a negative control is one that does not have the substance for which you are testing. For example, if you were testing the effect of a fuel additive on your car's gas mileage, a negative control would be a measurement of the gas mileage without using the additive.

2. Do you think all cell lines will respond the same way to the growth factors? Construct a hypothesis for this experiment.

Answer 1

Answer 1: In this experiment, you should grow all three cell lines separately in thee sets of culture flasks. In one set of the flask, you should add the one growth factor in addition to the culture medium, In the second set of the flask, you should add the second growth factor in addition to the culture medium, and In the third set of the flask, you should not add any growth factor in culture medium. This third set of flask acts as a negative control or blank during the experiment. After 24 or 48 hours of incubation, you can observe the effect of the growth factor on cell lines.

Answer 2: All cell lines will respond in a different way to the growth factors because a growth factor has different property and have the ability to activate or stimulate the different type of cells for their growth and proliferation. During the experiment, it can be clearly observed that some cell lines grow faster whereas some are growing slower and some cells do not show any effect on cell lines.