Imaging Room Temperature Slides

On Friday (March 7th), I took images of the slides from my room temperature experiment from last week! I started by taking white light pictures with my phone. I took one image per blocking time, with each concentration labeled. I also included the control slide in each image, which was blocked with PBS for 2 hours. Here are the resulting images.

The staining was opposite of what we initially expected- the lowest concentrations were stained darkest.

After finishing the white light images, I went down to the flatbed scanner to scan the slides. Even though this dye does not really fluoresce, we scanned them for fluorescence anyway to get images. Each column on the scanner corresponded to a certain time, with the concentration increases up the column.

In the resulting image, the darkest-stained slides turned out as the lightest when they were scanned, so we had to invert the resulting images, so the darkest-stained slides show as the darkest. I will eventually use these scanned images to evaluate the darkness of each slide in pixels to quantify what is otherwise qualitative data. This imaging will be the data to take away from the experiment as a whole, to determine the blocking buffer, time and temperature that will maximize blocking efficiency in other experiments.

JP is on spring break next week, and then I am on spring break for the two following weeks, so I will not be able to return to RPI until April 4th. I can't wait to get started on the next phase of my project, which will be the 37C experiment!