INTRODUCTION
Important Background Information
What is the Corpus Luteum?
|
What is Progesterone?
|
What is Prostaglandin?
|
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
|
EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
Using one hypoxia chamber, one set of luteal cells will be exposed to 5% oxygen. Another set will be exposed to 20% oxygen in an incubator. In each oxygenated chamber, there will be a sample of cells treated with vegetable oil, a sample treated with bovine serum albumin (BSA), and another sample treated with fish oil. Vegetable oil will be used because it is polyunsaturated like fish oil.
The independent variable in this study is treatment (fish oil, vegetable oil, or control medium) while the dependent variable is mitochondrial membrane potential.
The independent variable in this study is treatment (fish oil, vegetable oil, or control medium) while the dependent variable is mitochondrial membrane potential.
THE HYPOTHESES
PREDICTIONS
|
QUANTIFYING RESULTS
How is Mitochondrial Membrane Potential Measured?
Mitochondrial membrane potential can be measured by both flow cytometry and confocal microscopy. In a confocal microscope, the final image has the same focus as or the focus corresponds to the point of focus in the object. This means that we can more precisely show colocalizations of the signals from our cell samples to obtain clearer images. While microscopy can be used to generate highly specific images of samples, flow cytometry sorts cells in a sample according to size, complexity, and fluorescence to generate histogram plots with greater amounts of data. |