Single-particle tracking

The trajectory is typically analyzed using statistical methods to extract information about the underlying dynamics of the particle.

It addresses fundamental biological questions such as how a protein of interest finds its target in the complex cellular environment?

[12][13] Furthermore, exogenous particles are employed as probes to assess the mechanical properties of the medium, a technique known as passive microrheology.

Additionally, single-particle tracking has been extensively used in the study of reconstituted lipid bilayers,[22] intermittent diffusion between 3D and either 2D (e.g., a membrane) [23] or 1D (e.g., a DNA polymer) phases, and synthetic entangled actin networks.

Besides performing particle tracking in 2D, there are several imaging modalities for 3D particle tracking, including multifocal plane microscopy,[26] double helix point spread function microscopy,[27] and introducing astigmatism via a cylindrical lens or adaptive optics.

Principle of single-particle tracking: The rectangles represent frames from an image acquisition at times t = 0, 1, 2, ... The tracked particles are represented as red circles, and in the last frame, the reconstructed trajectories are shown as blue lines