Research Article

B-Lymphocytes from a Population of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Unaffected Siblings Exhibit Hypersensitivity to Thimerosal

Figure 4

This figure shows the concentration of thimerosal which induced a 50% inhibition of growth at day 5, measured by the XTT method (XTT-G50). In (a) we have ranked the color-coded cells in terms of sensitivity to thimerosal and have highlighted four family groups: A, B, C, and D. Underlined letters denote cell lines we believe have a heightened sensitivity to thimerosal. The distribution of the control population is indicated by the green line that indicated mean + SD, mean, mean – SD, and mean − 2SD. Distribution of Cells Types. In the upper insert, (b) we show the distribution of the four cells types, ASD, unaffected Twin, unaffected Sibling, and external age/sex matched control, in the four quartiles of the ranked distribution. There is less clustering of the ASD derived cells, but as with the LDH assay, the external controls are distributed to the right hand side of the rankings. Test for Systemic Errors. In the second insert, (c) we show that there is no systemic correlation between low XTT-G50’s in cells drawn from families from an ASD background and their respective controls. The plot in (c) shows the average and standard deviation of the difference between the appropriate age/sex matched control and each of the ASD familial XTT-G50. The positive values indicate that cells from the affected families are more sensitive than the external controls. The values indicate the results from a one-tailed t-test, , with (*) indicating <0.05 and (***) indicating <0.005.
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