Assignment 4: finding and measuring things
Overview
Congratulations on completing assignment 3. Now you can say you built your own epifluorescence microscope and used it to image mammalian cells. How cool is that?
The in-lab part of this assignment is straightforward. You will make a fluorescent image of tiny microspheres for measuring resolution and then you will short movies of larger microspheres diffusing in glycerol. Easy. If your microscope is in shape, you ought to be able to get the lab part done in well under an hour. (The tiny microspheres do not produce very much light. Sometimes people struggle a bit to get them in focus. Hint: make sure your microscope is well-adjusted before you look at really tiny, dim things.)
The out-of-lab components of this assignment will involve writing some high-level analysis and image processing code in MATLAB. You will be writing code to simulate data, use nonlinear fitting to measure the size of beads in an image, and track particles through frames of a movie. Many students find that developing the code is challenging and it can take much longer than expected. Please don't hesitate to work on your code in 16-336 during lab hours. The instructors are happy to work alongside you to get through MATLAB's many curiosities and frustrations.
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