Mutagenic and toxic effects of different concentrations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae D7 cells.

Tobacco use is a very common act among people nowadays. Even though it is known that constant use of tobacco leads to cancer and such serious diseases, there is not quantitative data obtained through experimentation to prove it. However, some researches show that nicotine use can cause several mutations in living organism cells. So, in this experiment both mutagenic and toxic effects of nicotine on living cells are measured. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is used as the test organism, since it has the closest structure to human cells. Since mutagenic effects are measured, D7 cells of S.cerevisiae that are specially designed by Zimmermann to observe mutagenic effect of a mutagen are used. First, a proper growth media for S.cerevisae cells were prepared and then the D7 cells were put in these cells. In these growth media, nicotine solutions with different concentrations were put, while simultaneously decreasing the concentration of the YEPD solution to maintain the total amount of media in petri dishes. After keeping the cells in these media at 28oC for 2 hours, 50 µl of the cells and nicotine- YEPD media mixture is plated onto YPD agar plates then incubated for 7 days at 28oC to observe red and white colonies. So, by counting them, quantitative data was gained. After processing the raw data collected, the results showed that, as the concentration of nicotine increases in the growth media of a cell culture, the number of colonies (living cells) decreases, while the number of red cell colonies increases. Even though this could be said by just considering the raw data, hypothesis needed to be proved in a mathematical way, so Anova: Single Factor was applied to the data. Result of this test showed that the p-values of both toxicity and mutation measurements were smaller than 0,05, so alternative hypothesis were accepted for both of them. This means, at the end of the experiment the toxic and mutagenic effects of tobacco on living cells were both mathematically and visually shown