GEMspa: a Napari plugin for analysis of single particle tracking data

The cellular environment is crowded with macromolecules and far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This active, crowded environment influences biochemical reactions and the formation of cellular structures such as membraneless organelles. These physical properties can change during normal physiology and in disease states such as neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, impacting cell behavior and function. Therefore, it is crucial to develop methods to characterize these properties. Microrheology is the inference of physical properties from the motion of tracer particles embedded within a material. This technique requires single particle tracking (SPT) and analysis of these tracks through the framework of soft-condensed matter physics. Analysis of SPT data can be challenging due to the lack of comprehensive user-friendly software tools. To address this, we introduce GEMspa, a software package implemented as a plugin for the open source image analysis platform, napari. GEMspa provides a GUI for a commonly used localization/tracking algorithm (via Trackpy), and a suite of methods to extract basic parameters describing particle motion. This platform aims to streamline the workflow of data analysis steps and allow researchers to visualize and optimize parameters for high-quality results, thereby making microrheology accessible to non-expert scientists.