An Imaging Flow Cytometer for Introductory Physics

Abstract

Over the past year, Princeton has been developing a new one-semester survey-style Physics for the Life Sciences course as a possible alternative pathway for life science majors. This course will engage students on selected topics commonly encountered in the life sciences including forces and motion on the cellular scale, fluids, light, and imaging. The class will also be offered with a full laboratory. Several successful introductory science and engineering courses at Princeton have a laboratory component centered on completion of a single extended project comprised of multiple components, each of which explore a topic central to the learning goals of the class. Building on this successful model, we have developed a modular project appropriate for the new life science initiative (an imaging light-sheet flow cytometer) that combines elements of the major topics into a single project that can be completed over the semester and used as the basis for a final lab project. Here we describe construction and function of the imaging cytometer including sources for the components and course-appropriate analysis to measure fluorescence intensity distributions and hydrodynamic diffusion properties.