Senior Krystal Weissert, recipient of an A.J. Palumbo Student research Grant, wrote the following about her research entitled “Effects of bacterial cell wall components, bacterial toxins and inflammatory agents on retinal epithelial cell cultures (CRL-2302) to determine cell viability.”
 
“The purpose of my project was to use an in vitro alternative epithelial cell culture to look at the effects of eye toxicity to better understand bacterial infections of the eye.  In my project, I looked at the effects of lipopolysacharides (LPS), an outer component of Gram-negative bacterial cell walls, and an alpha-toxin to determine the extent to which they damaged or varied the growth of the cells.
 
“My research began with cell culturing my retinal epithelial cells.  The subculturing was done for three weeks before any experimentation was done.  After this, I treated my wells with the lipopolysacharides and alpha-toxin.  I also left some of the wells untreated to have control wells.  I used a kit called the WST-1 to determine cell viability.
 
“I did five weeks of experimentation with varying amounts of alpha-hemolysin and LPS (2, 5, and 10µl alpha-hemolysin, 2,5,10, and 20µl lipopolysaccaride).  I then used a statistical test called an independent-samples t-test to analyze my data.  The alpha-toxin treated cell viabilities were significantly lower than the control cell viabilities (p≤0.05; 5 trials).  The LPS treated cell viabilities were not significantly different to the control cell viabilities (p>0.05; 4 trials). 

“My results for the alpha-toxin were expected although I thought that the LPS would also cause significant cell fatality to the cultures. The discrepancy could be due to the strength of the different components.  Further experimentation could be done with higher amounts of the LPS to see if there were changes in the cell growth.”