I liked how you related your topic to real life. This can connect people with your research and help them understand certain parts of it better. What other control data do you refer to when talking about performing your experiment again?
Hi Alan! I mention testing more control data because our class control data this semester had very high standard deviation, which made the mean + 2SD (the qualification for classifying a compound as a hit for a radiation protector) to be equal to a 105% survival rate. This means it was impossible for us to conclude that compounds were potential radiation protectors because you can’t have a survival rate of over 100%. We’re not entirely sure why our class data had such a high standard deviation. My guess would be that because it was class data, everyone had a slightly different way of preparing their control vials and this may have contributed to variation in data. Additionally, at certain points our fly food became contaminated with bacteria, and we don’t know how this impacted our control data. So, I would like to redo the control data in the future in order to make sure that the methods and results are consistent and hopefully lessen the standard deviation so that we could see more clearly whether or not our compound is a potential radiation protector.
I was hoping you could highlight a few comparisons in toxicity in comparison to most chemotherapy forms and Strontium carbonate nanoparticles for chemotherapy.
Hi Sania! Thanks for your question. Our positive control is colchicine, which is a known chemotherapeutic used for cancers such as prostate cancer. For reference, our cumulative percent survival for colchicine is 3.807%, which is significantly lower than the survival rate of our flies treated with the max dose of strontium carbonate nanoparticles with radiation of 77.5%. So, we can see that colchicine is much more toxic to tumor cells than strontium carbonate nanoparticles.
Hi Sarah! Good job on your poster and presentation! One thing that I’m curious about is, why do you think your control data came out lower than the class’s control data?
Hi Ashley, good question! I don’t have a conclusive answer for why our control data was lower than the class data. My best guess would be that there was a different factor that was more toxic to the flies in our control data, such as more of them being killed in radiation than were supposed to or the food not being prepared correctly, etc. It would be great to do more trials with the controls to try and understand why our control data was lower.
Hi Emery! We chose to test our compound on flies treated with radiation in order to explore the combinatorial therapy of our compound in conjunction with radiotherapy. There has been a lot of research showing that combinatorial therapies (which consist of multiple types of cancer therapy at once) are more effective at treating cancer and can help reduce the likelihood of the cancer developing multidrug resistance. Our hypothesis was that the compound in conjunction with radiation would result in a lower survival rate for the flies than the compound alone.
Well done overall! In your dose response experiment, is there a reason why there is little variation in the 3 bars and why 1 much lower than the others?
Hi Avery, that’s a great question. So in our third dilution series, we did have a survival rate of around 33% whereas the survival rate in all the other dilution series were 50%. However, these data are not very reliable because we had very few flies to draw data from. For example, in our vial with the third dilution series, we had a total of 21 pupal cases where 7 eclosed and 14 did not, meaning that 14 flies died. There were supposed to be 50-100 flies in each vial, so the low number of flies makes the data slightly less reliable than it should be. So, to answer your question, there could be an unknown reason why our third dilution series was more toxic to the flies, or it could be the more simple and likely explanation that there was more variation than there should have been because our sample size in the dose response vials was too small. This is an area that we could definitely improve upon in further research.
Great presentation! If you were to continue with the compound on the basis that it could potentially be a radiation protector, what would be your next steps?
Hi Khyathi, thanks for the question! My next steps would be to repeat the experiment with new control data, a larger sample size, and a more concentrated dosage of the compound. Based on the outcome of these data, we would be able to understand if strontium carbonate nanoparticles are worth pursuing as a radiation protector if the survival rate came out to be above 2 standard deviations of the mean of the negative control data.
I liked how you related your topic to real life. This can connect people with your research and help them understand certain parts of it better. What other control data do you refer to when talking about performing your experiment again?
Hi Alan! I mention testing more control data because our class control data this semester had very high standard deviation, which made the mean + 2SD (the qualification for classifying a compound as a hit for a radiation protector) to be equal to a 105% survival rate. This means it was impossible for us to conclude that compounds were potential radiation protectors because you can’t have a survival rate of over 100%. We’re not entirely sure why our class data had such a high standard deviation. My guess would be that because it was class data, everyone had a slightly different way of preparing their control vials and this may have contributed to variation in data. Additionally, at certain points our fly food became contaminated with bacteria, and we don’t know how this impacted our control data. So, I would like to redo the control data in the future in order to make sure that the methods and results are consistent and hopefully lessen the standard deviation so that we could see more clearly whether or not our compound is a potential radiation protector.
Hello Sarah,
I was hoping you could highlight a few comparisons in toxicity in comparison to most chemotherapy forms and Strontium carbonate nanoparticles for chemotherapy.
Hi Sania! Thanks for your question. Our positive control is colchicine, which is a known chemotherapeutic used for cancers such as prostate cancer. For reference, our cumulative percent survival for colchicine is 3.807%, which is significantly lower than the survival rate of our flies treated with the max dose of strontium carbonate nanoparticles with radiation of 77.5%. So, we can see that colchicine is much more toxic to tumor cells than strontium carbonate nanoparticles.
Hi Sarah! Good job on your poster and presentation! One thing that I’m curious about is, why do you think your control data came out lower than the class’s control data?
Hi Ashley, good question! I don’t have a conclusive answer for why our control data was lower than the class data. My best guess would be that there was a different factor that was more toxic to the flies in our control data, such as more of them being killed in radiation than were supposed to or the food not being prepared correctly, etc. It would be great to do more trials with the controls to try and understand why our control data was lower.
Great job! Why did you choose to test with radiation before trying chemo? Did you predict that radiation would have more success than chemo?
Hi Emery! We chose to test our compound on flies treated with radiation in order to explore the combinatorial therapy of our compound in conjunction with radiotherapy. There has been a lot of research showing that combinatorial therapies (which consist of multiple types of cancer therapy at once) are more effective at treating cancer and can help reduce the likelihood of the cancer developing multidrug resistance. Our hypothesis was that the compound in conjunction with radiation would result in a lower survival rate for the flies than the compound alone.
Great job! Why did you choose to test with radiation before trying chemo? Did you predict that radiation would have more success than chemo?
Well done overall! In your dose response experiment, is there a reason why there is little variation in the 3 bars and why 1 much lower than the others?
Hi Avery, that’s a great question. So in our third dilution series, we did have a survival rate of around 33% whereas the survival rate in all the other dilution series were 50%. However, these data are not very reliable because we had very few flies to draw data from. For example, in our vial with the third dilution series, we had a total of 21 pupal cases where 7 eclosed and 14 did not, meaning that 14 flies died. There were supposed to be 50-100 flies in each vial, so the low number of flies makes the data slightly less reliable than it should be. So, to answer your question, there could be an unknown reason why our third dilution series was more toxic to the flies, or it could be the more simple and likely explanation that there was more variation than there should have been because our sample size in the dose response vials was too small. This is an area that we could definitely improve upon in further research.
Great presentation! If you were to continue with the compound on the basis that it could potentially be a radiation protector, what would be your next steps?
Hi Khyathi, thanks for the question! My next steps would be to repeat the experiment with new control data, a larger sample size, and a more concentrated dosage of the compound. Based on the outcome of these data, we would be able to understand if strontium carbonate nanoparticles are worth pursuing as a radiation protector if the survival rate came out to be above 2 standard deviations of the mean of the negative control data.