Forum 02/26/2004

“Elements of Quantitative Fluorescence Speckle Microscopy”

Thomas Marlovits, Ph.D. Project Leader – Dept of Molecular Biophysics, Yale Univ. School of Medicine

Fluorescent speckle microscopy (FSM) has become a key tool for the in-vivo analysis of cytoskeleton dynamics (Waterman-Storer and Danuser, Curr. Biol., 2002). To exploit its quantitative potential, we have developed a software to convert the stochastic dynamics of thousands of speckles per FSM movie into maps of cytoskeleton turnover and transport. In this talk I will discuss the technical aspects of the algorithm and then show the potential of our software with a few selected biological results.