Senior Project Week 2 (4/8-4/12)

After receiving my lab training and observing the proper protocol for preparing the droplet solution and observing the droplets under the microscope, this week I was finally able to begin conducting experiments on my own. I started out this by week creating a test sample with the two-flavor droplets, diluting them each 10 times in the buffer, and running experiments under the microscope by heating the droplets to 50C, aligning them with a magnet into chains, and subsequently cooling the droplets to room temperature and removing the magnet to watch the droplets fold. 

After I was sure I was familiar enough with this experiment design and protocol, we developed a game plan for what exactly our study would look like so I knew exactly how to design the experiments in the future. We decided we would be working with a single flavor of DNA, a palindrome sequence that binds with itself. We would keep the concentration of DNA on the droplets constant, and vary the volume fraction, or concentration of droplets in the buffer. Under the microscope, we would then repeat the same procedure of heating and aligning the droplets, and examine how the average chain length and time until steady state (a state where droplets are no longer actively forming chains) varied with volume fraction. 

With this experiment design in mind, the team and I began examining the behavior of droplet samples with different volume fractions. By the end of the week, we had studied the behavior of droplets diluted 4x and 16x, and found that these seemed to be the approximate upper and lower bounds of concentrations that adequately made chains. 4x diluted droplets made very long chains, but were slightly too crowded in the sample and were beginning to form aggregates, and 16x diluted droplets were only able to make chains that were 3-5 droplets long. I am excited to see what more progress we make in the coming weeks with more samples of varying volume fractions.