emulsions were imaged by microscopy. A monolayer of droplets was sandwiched
between two glass slides (1 mm thick bottom slide, Paul Marienfeld
GmbH & Co, 0.17 mm thick top slide, VWR) spaced using 10 μm
polystyrene particles (Polysciences, Inc.) to avoid droplet compression.
The chamber was sealed with epoxy glue (Sader). Images were acquired
on an epifluorescence microscope Eclipse Ti equipped with a motorized
XY stage (Nikon), a camera Nikon DS-Qi2, an apochromatic 10×
objective (N.A. 0.45, Nikon) and a CoolLed pE-400 illumination source.
Composite images were generated with the open source software ImageJ.
Droplets were analyzed using the Mathematica software (Wolfram) by
following a previously reported procedure.28 (link) The concentration of microRNA is computed using the formula and where Fg and Fr are the
fraction of green- and red-positive
droplets, respectively; NA is the Avogadro
number, and V is the volume of the droplets.