Total workflows of the single-molecule imaging analysis in living cells: a tutorial guidance to the measurement of the drug effects on a GPCR

Single-molecule imaging (SMI) is a powerful method to measure the dynamics of membrane proteins on the cell membrane. The single-molecule tracking (SMT) analysis provides information about the diffusion dynamics, the oligomer size distribution, and the particle density change. The affinity and on/off-rate of a protein--protein interaction can be estimated from the dual-color SMI analysis. However, it is difficult for trainees to determine quantitative information from the SMI movies. The present protocol guides the detailed workflows to measure the drug-activated dynamics of a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) and metabotropic glutamate receptor 3 (mGluR3), by using the total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM). This tutorial guidance comprises an open-source software named smDynamicsAnalyzer, with which one can easily analyze the SMT dataset by just following the workflows after building a designated folder structure (https://github.com/masataka-yanagawa/IgorPro8-smDynamicsAnalyzer).