The purpose of the proposed project is to provide minority (Black) undergraduate students in the Department of Biology, a carefully designed biomedical research that focuses on the use of video microscopy and digitized image analysis to monitor morphological changes in normal and malignantly transformed cells and to assess the impact of morphological modulations on tumorigenesis. The initial investigation will attempt to initiate morphologically variant cell types from transformed hepatocytes and a tumor cell line derived from mouse adenocarcinoma. Clonal derivatives from these cells will be examined, through the use of video counting and microdensitometry, for differences in their uptake and retention of fluorescent dyes (cell density), total cell area, shape factor (fraction for estimating the amount by which a cell varies from a circle), parameter, and nuclear/cytoplasmic ratio of normal and malignantly transformed cells. The clonal isolates will be used to determine the histological types of tumors arising from implantation of specific phenotypically variant cell lines. Karyomorphology of phenotypically variant cell lines will be determined to monitor possible chromosomal changes that may attend in vitro cytodifferentiation. It is felt that morphological and karyomorphological analysis of cells from a single tumor but variant phenotypes will provide valuable information on the series of cytological changes associated with cellular differentiation.
