Fig. 3: Passive and active droplets in radius profiles.
From: Active coacervate droplets are protocells that grow and resist Ostwald ripening
Bottom: a Passive coacervate droplets exhibit discrete increases in radius or (b) at lower volume fraction can remain stable for minutes. c The gradual increase in droplet radius over time is characteristic of active droplets, for which also the droplet count increases. All: left axes indicate droplet radius (in μm) and right axes indicate droplet count. For visual clarity, only three exemplary traces were chosen out of each experiment. The output of the analysis containing all traces in (a) and (b) can be found in Supplementary Fig. 7. All traces of (c) are shown and discussed further in Fig. 5a. Top: scale bars are 10 μm. Full microscopy frames can be found in Supplementary Fig. 8. From the confocal slices, we extract droplet radii to calculate the total coacervate volume and use the field of view as a rectangular cuboid to calculate total volume.
