Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, I'm conducting a science fair project based on the effects that both animal and human insulin have on hypoglycemia. I'm still in the process of forming my experimental procedure and I need help on getting started. I'm thinking about testing the effects using blood but I am not sure what type of cells would be best to test on. Any suggestions ?

Hi,

There are two types of cells that are the primary targets of insulin—muscle cells (myocytes) and fat cells (adipocytes). Muscles store excess glucose in the form of glycogen and adipocytes store it as fat. If glucose levels in the blood drop too low, the person can suffer from low blood sugar—hypoglycemia. Depending on what questions you want to answer you could use either one or both of these cell types.

I’ve never grown adipocytes, but muscle cells are quite easy to culture and work with. You can buy a frozen stock of rat L6 myoblast cells from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) but they are quite expensive: http://www.atcc.org/products/all/CRL-14 ... nformation

My recommendation would be to call around to any research colleges or universities that are near where you live and find a lab that is doing diabetes research with cultured human cells. You can ask them if they would be willing to take you on as a student volunteer to learn cell culture and do some experiments with insulin.
What is the question that you want to ask about hypoglycemia? If you haven’t already done so, read the Scibuddies guide to planning a science project: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndex.shtml

This guide provides you with all the information you need to research a project, develop a hypothesis and design appropriate, statistically-controlled experiments.

Let us know if you have more questions, and remember—we can answer your questions better if you will tell us exactly what your hypothesis is and how you plan to test it.

Good luck!

Sybee

Hi there,

SciB already gave you some excellent advice, but I agree that we would be able to provide you with more helpful advice if you give us more details about your main question, hypothesis, and planned experimental procedures. What do you mean exactly by "testing the effects using blood"? Are you going to be putting blood onto cells? Where will you be getting that blood from? Why not incubate cells with pure insulin instead? What effects do you expect the blood to have on the cells?

Let us know more and we'll be glad to help you brainstorm!

Connie