Jul 20, 2015
Here is my first paper! It is all about making fluorescent proteins specifically for two-photon microscopes. To make these new fluorescent proteins we screened thousands of randomly mutated versions of the popular green fluorescent protein, EGFP. The hard part was imaging the two-photon excited fluorescence of these thousands of mutants. We had to build a special imaging setup that used a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser to image 10 cm Petri dishes. A few hundred colonies of E. coli were grown on each Petri dish we imaged. In each colony of E. coli a different mutated version of EGFP was expressed. This allowed us to look at the two-photon excited fluorescence of about 10,000 mutants a day.