can anyone tell me, when they refer to concentrations of 0.5ml/ml and 1ml/ml, does this mean 50% and 100% flavouring levels, or what?
Good question! I had to go back and look through it again to answer this since it too was not clear to me when I first read it.
On page 8 you can see they vaped an ecig into a clear glass sidearm flask to collect its condensation and this was what they added to the cells in culture at various ratios of ml condensate to ml standard cell culture medium. It appears cell culture medium was present in the bottom of the collection flask, so the ml condensate was not straight ecig condensate, but already a very dilute mixture of ecig condensate in medium. They probably had to do this since not very much 100% condensate could be collected (unless they puffed away for considerably longer), and even if they could collect boatloads of 100% condensate, they would have had to add very small [dilute] quantities of this to the cells to obtain a relevant graph. Since they did the same with a regular (analog) cig, except with vastly fewer "puffs", then the comparison(s) one can make is most relevant.
They mentioned using untreated cells as a control, which is the most appropriate control since they are comparing with an analog cigaratte. In the future, it would be nice to see what everything, but flavor is doing as well, and then this would be considered the most appropriate control for the flavor component, but again this would only allow comparison across flavors.
This sort of research is undoubtedly vital to our community and I am very glad that they are doing this. Thank you FlavourArt!
