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Discussion The effects of ethanol on body mass The regression graphs illustrate a
decrease in mass as ethanol dose increases (Figure
1). However, this notable
decrease is not significant (Table
1). The lack of a significant
relationship between body mass to ethanol dose could
possibly be explained by the fact that all body cells are
not derived from NCC, which have been observed to be
affected by ethanol (Cartwright and Smith, 1995, Sulik et
al., 1988, and Blader and Strähle, 1998). A proposed,
yet unsubstantiated, argument for the observed decline in
mass is that perhaps all body cells are affected by ethanol
treatment to varying degrees. Future research could pursue
this study. An additional reason why a significant
difference was not noted may be because a single dose was
insufficient to obtain a critical level of ethanol to
significantly affect the embryo. Continued research on
increasing the concentration of ethanol or the number of
injections over time could reveal that body mass is affected
by ethanol treatments. We did not investigate these
possibilities in this experiment. We propose continued
research should use a larger sample size to determine if the
observed amount of variation is acceptable or if the
variation using the same protocol will, in fact,
decrease. |
Last Modified: 24 April 2004
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