qSR: A software for quantitative analysis of single molecule and super-resolution data

Abstract

Single-molecule based super-resolution microscopy (Betzig et al., 2006; Hess et al., 2006; Rust et al., 2006) provides insight into the spatiotemporal organization and dynamics of biomolecules at the length scale of ten to hundreds of nanometers, which is most relevant to protein clustering in a broad range of cellular processes. A series of quantitative analysis approaches have been developed to infer the characteristic size of protein clustering via pair correlation analysis (Sengupta et al., 2013; Sengupta et al., 2011; Veatch et al., 2012) or to merge multiple blinking localizations from single fluorophores (Annibale et al., 2011), to identify clusters based on density of detections (Ester, 1996), and to measure temporal dynamics of protein clustering in living cells (Cho et al., 2016a; ...