Week 4 - Experimenting with Temperatures and Concentrations

 This week was all about testing different concentrations to see which would give a better signal.  Monday, we received a SLA sensor in our lab! Now we will be able run tests here in the lab when we are not at Sharp.  After attending a meeting with Andrei, Mariya and Holly, Vena and I traveled to Sharp to run tests on multiple and single probe dies using a high concentration of DNA at 0.1 ug/ul. On Tuesday, we tested the dies at a lower concentration of  0.01 ug/ul to see whether the signal was better. Unfortunately, it was not as good as expected so Andrei decided we would try a concentration between the two which came to 0.03 ug/ul.  He expected that this concentration will give a better signal which results in a better exponential factor.  He also suspected that different temperatures will increase the signal.  Wednesday was all about testing the new hypothesis.  I ran test on single and multiple probe dies at CMOP with the new concentration and analyzed the data. The signal was not very good with the new concentration but Vena and I decided maybe a higher temperature will increase it.  Thursday, we returned to Sharp to try the dies at a higher temperature and the signal did seem to get better.  After running the tests, we returned to CMOP to attend a lab talk meeting. Friday, I had to run 5 different dies to test the signals at different temperatures. Next week, we will continue experimenting with the different temperatures!