Assignment 8 Overview: flow channel & two-color microscope

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20.309: Biological Instrumentation and Measurement

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Overview

In Assignments 6 and 7, you familiarized yourselves with the basic tools and measurement techniques used in electronics. In the remaining assignments this semester, we'll work towards measuring the osmotic shock response of yeast cells. We'll build a few circuits, but more importantly, we'll apply the framework that we've learned - using transfer functions, feedback, and fourier transforms - to understand a biological system.

Our experiments are based off of research published in Science by MIT researchers in 2008 [1]. The basic idea is that we will use a microfluidic device to flow either regular or high-salt media over yeast cells, and measure the nuclear localization of the protein Hog1 using our fluorescence microscopes. We'll oscillate the flow of media from low to high salt at varying frequencies, and measure the amplitude and phase of Hog1's response.

With this goal in mind, the focus of this week's assignment is to implement a few upgrades to our microscopes, and incorporate the fluidic device and control components. It is broken into three parts:

  1. Part 1: fabricate a microfluidic device;
  2. Part 2: implement 2-color imaging;
  3. Part 3: test your device with fluorescein.

Submit your work on Stellar in a single PDF file with the naming convention <Lastname><Firstname>Assignment8.pdf.

References

  1. J. T. Mettetal, D. Muzzey, C. Gomez-Uribe, and A. van Oudenaarden, “The Frequency Dependence of Osmo-Adaptation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae,” Science, vol. 319, no. 5862, pp. 482–484, 2008

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