HL-60 cells are multipotent, which means that they are able to form multiple cell types but are restricted to a specific lineage (Cirtain et al., 2016). HL- 60 cell line has been used as an in vitro system for studying cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the proliferation and differentiation of normal and leukemic cells of the hematopoietic, or white blood cell lineage (Xie et al., 1998). HL-60 cells are invaluable as they are easy to maintain, differentiate and can be used to investigate cell development, or gene expression. HL-60 cells can be used to induce differentiation via signal transduction into monocytes, granulocytes, and lymphocytes using various chemical agents (Cirtain et al., 2016). HL-60 cells are also used to test differentiation by viewing the cell morphology and apoptosis. After differentiation, HL-60 cells are no longer immortal and undergo an apoptosis. Apoptosis is a naturally occurring programmed cell death (Cirtain et al., …show more content…
We are going to test this differentiation by viewing morphological changes. We hypothesize that granulocytic differentiation for HL-60 cells is higher for the cells that ate exposed for longer time to retinoic acid as concluded and previously researched by Breitman et al (1980). We also expect that HL-60 cells will not differentiate if they are not exposed to retinoic acid. The null hypothesis is that there is no difference in granulocytic differentiation among different exposure