Retinoic Acid Effects on Early Amphibian Development

Overview

Objectives/Goals How does retinoic acid affect early stages of development? The objective of my experiment is to study how retinoic acid affects development in amphibians. Methods/Materials 15 Petri dishes DMSO Ethanol 1 Digital Camera 1500 Xenopus Embryos 1% Retinoic Acid 1) Fertilize embryos 2) Make stock retinoic acid solution with DMSO 3) Make serial dilution of retinoic acid in water. 4) Apply retinoic acid into Petri dishes that contains 100 embryos at the gastrula stage each. 5) Leave for 30 minutes and then wash retinoic acid. 6) Leave in water for several days. 7) Repeat steps 1-6 with neural stage embryos. 8) Take pictures and record data. Results All the .01% solution embryos died. The higher the concentration of retinoic acid there were, the more deformations were found. The mutations included embryos with fused eyes, no eyes, no faces (heads) or only one eye. Conclusions/Discussion Retinoic acid both affected the embryos at the gastrula and neural stages equally. Tretinoin consists 1% of retinoic acid, but in the experiment, just small concentrations of the retinoic acid caused severe mutations in amphibian embryos. Although amphibians could be more sensitive to retinoic acid than human infants, Tretinoin should be handled carefully.

Awards (1)

• Category Award

Competition history

• CSEF 2005 Pharmacology/ Toxicology · Entry J1406

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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