Single Particle Tracking: Analysis Techniques for Live Cell Nanoscopy.

Single molecule experiments are a set of experiments designed specifically to study the properties of individual molecules. It has only been in the last three decades where single molecule experiments have been applied to the life sciences; where they have been successfully implemented in systems biology for probing the behaviors of sub-cellular mechanisms. The advent and growth of super-resolution techniques in single molecule experiments has made the fundamental behaviors of light and the associated nano-probes a necessary concern among life scientists wishing to advance the state of human knowledge in biology. This dissertation disseminates some of the practices learned in experimental live cell microscopy. The topic of single particle tracking is addressed here in a format that is designed for the physicist who embarks upon single molecule studies. Specifically, the focus is on the necessary procedures to generate single particle tracking analysis techniques that can be implemented to answer biological questions. These analysis techniques range from designing and testing a particle tracking algorithm to inferring model parameters once an image has been processed. The intellectual contributions of the author include the techniques in diffusion estimation, localization filtering, and trajectory associations for tracking which will all be discussed in detail in later chapters. The author of this thesis has also contributed to the software development of automated gain calibration, live cell particle simulations, and various single particle tracking packages. Future work includes further evaluation of this laboratory's single particle tracking software, entropy based approaches towards hypothesis validations, and the uncertainty quantification of gain calibration.