Juanita Mathews PhD

Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University – Medford, USA

My name is Juanita Mathews and I work on the bioelectric control in cell development and cancer. More specifically, I want to understand how ion channels set resting membrane potential and how this determines cell fate decisions. I am using optogenetic channels to be able to set and finetune membrane potential.
We used to use a DIY illumination device where you could exchange the 2 LEDs/well which was nice! The problem was, that it did not have any diffuser, so you would have 2 very bright spots. When I used this device, I would see a Figure 8 pattern, where the cells over the bright areas would change, but the rest would not.
Instead of going down the rabbit hole and optimizing the system ourselves, we decided to work with the optoWELL. This way, we solved the problem of inhomogeneous illumination without months of prototyping!