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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2024 Jan 1.
Published in final edited form as: Methods Mol Biol. 2023;2563:237–260. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2663-4_12

Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Active fusion of droplets monitored by optical tweezers and brightfield camera. (a) After being brought together by optical traps, two droplets fuse while being suspended by the traps, leading to changes in the edge-to-edge distance (L) and the forces sensed by the two optical traps. The overall power of optical traps is set to a very low level as to not impede the droplet fusion. (b) Brightfield snapshots of fusing droplets. (c) Red: normalized force signal from the stationary trap (trap2); black: fit to a stretched exponential function; green: edge-to-edge distance of the fusing droplets. The brightfield camera has a much lower time resolution than the force signal (compare the red and green traces) and thus its use for quantitative analysis is limited to droplets that fuse relatively slowly.