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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.

©Cebra-Thomas, 2000

Last Modified: 24 April 2004
