... saves you one entire hour of literature reading! Isn't that a great deal?! Well, after that week in lab, I felt that's not even as cool as any weird raffle after I participated in a survey. But it turned out that it be completely fine to do it all again, since we had slightly different conditions then most papers.
What's going on: We want to study polymerizing tubulin and it happens to work particularly well at 35°C. So we have to heat up the chamber of the microscope we work with (a confocal microscope) to 35°C which takes about 25 min. That's when we could start measuring. But as it turned out, different parts of the microscope have to adjust to the 35°C, i.e. they expand the sample drifts. Unfortunately, we are considered about dynamics in the sample, so it's important if you image the very same spot and the sample got moved there or if it moved itself...
Thus, you need some rigid reference, for example, on the glass surface and you record the sample's drift as well. Fluorescent beads become your reference by baking them onto the glass.
It turned out, that all major dynamics we saw were due to drift and we don't have a dynamic network (yet!). We needed about a week to explore different conditions and looking at literature confirmed that (at least, that's the optimistic interpretation ;)).
