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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

secretory phospholipase A II, apoptosis, virus

College

Life Sciences

Department

Physiology and Developmental Biology

Abstract

Well, to be perfectly honest, this project has been fraught with disaster since the beginning. We obtained 400 microliters of the immunosuppressive strain of Minute Virus of Mice (MVMi) at 1 x 109 pfu/mL from Dr. David J. Pintel at the University of Missouri-Columbia. MVMi was the only virus we could find that would infect our cell line (S49 mouse T-lymphoma cells. Because S49 cells are suspension cells and not adherent, they do not form plaques when infected with a virus, which makes it more difficult to quantify how many cells have been successfully infected with the virus. Instead, we attempted to perform a TCID50 assay, where one scores samples as either + or – for evidence of an infection at different concentrations of the virus and titrates the virus that way. Unfortunately, cytopathic effects of the virus were confounded when our cells became contaminated with some sort of fungus. We tried a few more times to observe the effects of the viral infection on a cell culture, but every time, our cells (even the control cells) exhibited the effects of fungal contamination instead of a viral infection.

Included in

Physiology Commons

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