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Nikon congratulates Sabrina Lin, a graduate student at University of California Riverside (UCR), who received the First Place Award for her presentation at the 10th Annual Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology Research Symposium. Sabrina, whose presentation was titled “Determining the effects of cigarette smoke on early development using a novel time lapse assay and human embryonic stem cells as a model for pre-implantation embryos,” used Nikon’s BioStation IM and BioStation CT automated live cell incubation and imaging systems in her research.

Sabrina is a fourth year PhD student in the Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology Graduate Program at UCR. She has been instrumental in developing stem cell technology to assess the effects of cigarette smoke and other environmental toxicants on the prenatal stages of human development. Humans are more sensitive to environmental toxicants during prenatal development than at any other time in the life cycle, but in the past, this developmental stage has been difficult to study directly.

For her research, Sabrina used human embryonic stem cells (hESC) in conjunction with BioStation IM and CT technology to collect video data from live cells in an incubator during treatment with sidestream cigarette smoke (the smoke inhaled by passive smokers). hESC are generally tricky to manipulate and grow, but the BioStation IM and CT made it less complicated by providing systems for managing, observing and recording cell growth, morphology and protein expression in culture while providing consistent environmental control of temperature, humidity and gas concentration. In addition, hESC tend to like to be in clumps, but using the BioStation IM and CT, Sabrina was able to easily count the cells while also enabling observation of multiple end points from one set of experiments. Rather than taking snapshots at designated points in time, the BioStation IM and CT allowed Sabrina to obtain videos from which she could determine the morphology of the cells over time while using the programs to conduct quantitative analysis for toxicology assays.

Using BioStation technology, Sabrina was able to show that sidestream cigarette smoke from three harm reduction cigarettes was more potent than sidestream smoke from a widely used conventional brand. The most cytotoxic of all brands tested was a harm reduction brand. Moreover, all three harm reduction brands were more potent than the traditional brand in a stem cell attachment assay. This work, which was supported by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program of California, is important in showing that tobacco products often sold as “safe” are not necessarily less dangerous and may in fact be more dangerous than conventional brands.