Question

Oh no! A very tired and overworked student mixed up the sea urchin food with paclitaxel (a microtubule destabilizing drug)! Now, this student is unsure whether the graduate students will be able to do any experiments using sea urchin embryos tomorrow. Does this student need to worry? If yes, explain how you think paclitaxel will negatively impact experimentation. If no, explain why addition of paclitaxel will not affect experimentation.

Answer 1

Yes, the student need to worry because the addition of the paclitaxel a type of taxol is added to the sea urchin food. THe sea urchin when intake the paclitaxel along with the food, it will go insidse the sea urchin cells and blocks the cell division of the sea urchin. The paclitaxel affect the fast dividing cancer like cells. Sea urchin embryo undergo multiple division in short span of life so act as cancer cell and hence the embryo of the sea urchin will no longer divide. The taxol inhibits the nuclear movements during fertilization and induces asters in unfertilized sea urchin eggs.

So the graduate students will noty be able to study the cell division study in sea urchin embryos and the experiment will faile.