Team:Stanford-Brown/VenusLife/Chamber

The Millikan Apparatus

In order to put our newly engineered organisms to the test in an aerosolized environment, the team aimed to modify a Millikan Oil Drop Apparatus into a functioning suspension chamber.

Unfortunately, the suspension chamber experiment was rendered untestable due to several factors:

• The engineering of the Millikan Apparatus viewing scope to excite and detect fluorescence was impractical and challening.
• Control tests on evaporation in the chamber indicated that droplets would evaporate in under 10 minutes; a timescale too quick for studying cell replication.
• Insufficient time and resources to perform the necessary (and drastic) modifications to the Apparatus that would lead to successful experiments.

However, we successfully created cell-growth dependent promoters that function as remote biosensors; while our efforts in mechanical engineering were not so fruitful, the synthetic biology component was quite successful!