Characteristics data for lung tumor-bearing mice

This project addresses the theme of “impact of oil spills on public health”. Specifically, it address the general hypothesis, which is “upon oil/dispersant respiratory exposure there will be a higher carcinogenic potential of lung tissue”. To test this hypothesis, we attempted to determine if respiratory exposure to oil/dispersants accelerates tumorigenesis in lung tumor-bearing mice. For this, we took advantage of a lung tumor-bearing mouse model, the heterozygous K-Ras mice that normally develop lung tumors by 8-10 weeks of age. The mice were exposed through the oropharyngeal aspiration to the five exposure conditions (i.e., oil, dispersant 9500, dispersant 9527, oil+9500, oil+9527) plus the control condition (saline solution) for 3 weeks. Each group contains 3 or 4 male and 3 or 4 female mice so we have a total of 42 mice in the dataset.

The mice were monitored for weight, and the mean weight in each treatment group was compared with the control group from the beginning of exposure until euthanasia. After euthanasia, histopathological characterization was performed for the mouse lung for measurements of tumor lesion area, total lung area and lung tumor burden. These measurements were compared between a treatment group and the control group. In addition, total lung slide image (.jpg) for each mouse were also collected.