252 THE BIOLOGY OF HYDRA : 1961 



PHILLIPS: No. It just continues to look healthy. 



GOREAU: That is a beautiful piece of work. Do you know 

 what cell types your cultures actually come from? Have you tried 

 adding zooxanthellae? 



PHILLIPS: I haven't tried adding zooxanthellae. Some people 

 at Stanford are interested in this problem. I am planning to give 

 them my cultures to do this. With respect to the cell that I have 

 growing in culture, this becomes an extremely difficult question to 

 answer. For one thing, the appearance of the cells growing in 

 culture may be markedly different from the cells that one sees in 

 the intact animal as all the cells tend to round up on being freed 

 from the tissue mass. This makes it impossible, on the basis of 

 cell shape, to decide whether it is endoderm, mesoglea, or ectoderm. 



GOREAU: Perhaps you could start your cultures with scrapings 

 from specific areas rather than the whole animal. 



PHILLIPS: This is something we want to try. I have not devoted 

 a great deal of work to these culture lines although I've had them 

 in the laboratory for sometime. 



GOREAU: A very important matter to anyone who has ever 

 tried to dissect living coelenterates is the horrible problem of 

 being flooded with mucus. Are you actually cutting this down 

 with lysozyme? 



PHILLIPS: Definitely. There is one trick to that. The lysozyme 

 should not be added to sea water. High electrolyte concentration 

 is quite inhibitory to the action of lysozyme. It decreases its activity 

 by almost 50%. That's the reason I add it directly to the animal 

 before mincing the tissue. 



There is another thing I should mention, namely, the use of 

 fluorescent antibody techniques for identification of materials with- 

 in tissue. I have carried out work of this sort with these cells using 

 rabbit anti-anemone serum and fluorescently labeled dog anti- 

 rabbit globulin serum. This leads to a nice fluorescent uptake by 

 the cells growing in culture, and it also results in an uptake of 

 fluorescence by whole cell suspensions. But, I would not care to 

 put this forth as anything but supporting evidence for these cells 



