help with question

[raybay]

hello,can someone advise me on what the meaning to the following question title?
THE USE OF CULTURE CELLS IN THE DIAGNOSIS OF DISEASE?

this is a question from a uni course about cell biology and i have asked various people -mainly micro-biologists-and seem to get contradicting answers,some say to do an assignment on bacterial growth,some say it needs to be on viral growth and others have gone on about monkey kidneys!

i need to do a 1000 word assignment on the subject but not sure which way to go about it.if someone could tell me what the title means to them and how they would approach the subject i would be grateful.....thanks in advance

[MrMistery]

well, there could be more aproaches on what to write your essay, depending on what kinds of cells to culture.
you could talk about culturing bacterial cells taken from the pacient and then procedeing on with identification according to biochemical testing(aka slipper method)- this is done, for example, in tuberculosis.
you could talk about any other desease by doing this(although i have never actually heard of anybody using this method): culture human cells and infect in vitro to check if they present the same characteristics as the ones from the pacient.
scratch that, more easy to do by electrophoresis. go with bacterial growth, it is the best choice.

[LilKim]

In addition ... my last job involved diagnosing cancer by chromosomal analysis. Essentially what we would do is... grow liquid cultures of of bone marrow or peripheral blood .. fix the cells and look for charachteristic chromosomal changes associated with cancer.. and progression of cancer. (You can also do this by culturing solid tumors)... a very similary process again, involves culturing the 'skin' cells from an amniotic fluid to look for chromosomal problems (eg +21 [down syndrome])

thie entire field is called "Cytogenetics".

If you're interested... I can probably help direct you to resources and stuff....

buena suerte!
- KIM