Inferring transient particle transport dynamics in live cells

Live-cell imaging and particle tracking provide rich information on mechanisms of intracellular transport. However, trajectory analysis procedures to infer complex transport dynamics involving stochastic switching between active transport and diffusive motion are lacking. We applied Bayesian model selection to hidden Markov modeling to infer transient transport states from trajectories of mRNA-protein complexes in live mouse hippocampal neurons and metaphase kinetochores in dividing human cells. The software is available at http://hmm-bayes.org/.

Nature Methods (2015) doi:10.1038/nmeth.3483
Nilah Monnier, Zachary Barry, Hye Yoon Park, Kuan-Chung Su, Zachary Katz, Brian P English, Arkajit Dey, Keyao Pan, Iain M Cheeseman, Robert H Singer & Mark Bathe