In the last post, I covered the basics of wound-healing assays and how to quantify and visualise them. This is great, but is the ability of cells to heal an artificial wound really what you want to measure? Probably not…
One of the major advantages of having environmental control on our microscopes at the CCI, is that you can get cells to behave a little more like they do in an animal or plant. A great example of this is when looking at cardiomyocytes that can spontaneously start to contract when grown in culture. You can see a load of these on YouTube.
These types of culture are a great model with which to study the effect of drugs or other treatments on the cells of the heart. This post will look at one way to quantify contractile motion without the need for exogenous stains or dyes (which can themselves perturb physiological behaviour).
In the first part we used Fiji to measure the size and shape of our SmartFlare Nanoparticles. After having done this with a couple of different TEM images we want to analyse these data and get some useful numbers and graphs.
With the (semi-) inaugural post for the blog, I’m going to get right down to it. In the Lévy Lab, we’re experimenting with Open Notebook Science, currently with a project involving SmartFlares.
Lab member Joan Comenge took some really nice Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) images of our gold nanoparticles, which look something like this:
TEM of SmartFlares (Uptake Control)
