Today, we hosted the first half of this year’s cohort of new Ph.D. student from the SynBio CDT for a chat about microfluidics. The students had a varied background (physics, chemistry, biology) but were all equally enthusiastic! We started with a presentation on microfluidics by Raphael, before heading down to the wetlab where we saw how to cut and bond a PDMS microfluidic channel onto a glass coverslip. Then the students took turns to cut a piece of glass capillary onto a microscope slide and filled it with a suspension of swimming algae (Chlamydomonas).

The group then moved to the microscopy room to observe the algae and record a movie of their motion. Finally, they tried to make the computer recognise the position of the microorganisms in their movies using a particle tracking Matlab code. They actually managed to do it quite well! Well done everybody!!