Week 8: Data Analysis and Final Graphs

Welcome back to my Senior Project blog! As a quick reminder, my research focuses on optimizing the production of Multilamellar Vesicles. These are microscopic bubbles that can deliver drugs and cosmetics through the skin and potentially replace painful injections. Over the past six weeks, I completed all my physical lab work by testing how different salt solutions affect the formation and yield of these vesicles. 

This week, I started extracting data from my images. To do this properly, I usually rely on a tool called a tile scan. Because a high-powered microscope captures only a very tiny square of the sample at a time, a tile scan stitches together many small images to create a map of the entire lipid film. I successfully did this for my Sodium and Calcium samples. However, I ran into an issue while stitching the images for my water and dPBS groups. The software could not align the pictures properly because my setup was incorrect. I completely restarted the digital stitching process for these two groups, but this time the software failed again. To continue the project, I decided to change my approach and decided to just use the raw individual images to count the vesicles for all my groups.

Despite that issue, this week was incredible because I finally translated my visual observations into quantitative data. My main goal was to manually count the number of vesicles formed in every single image to determine the overall yield. I compiled all of this raw data into a spreadsheet to calculate the average yield, CV, SEM, and SD for each solvent. I then created figures to easily compare the different solvents.

Going into tomorrow, my goal is to put the finishing touches on these graphs and ensure all my data tables are formatted correctly. With the data analysis phase complete, I will dedicate next week to writing my final research paper. Thank you for following along!

• Samahith