Abstract
One of the most fascinating processes in biology is the directed movement of organisms, subcellular compartments, and single proteins. Tracking the cellular motion is of great interest to single-molecule biophysicists to understand the mechanism of wide variety of biological processes, from basic mechanism of molecular machines to protein--protein interactions. In the last two decades, random diffusion of proteins and lipids has been tracked under the fluorescence microscope to understand how they associate with their targeted molecules. However, cellular motility is not limited to diffusion of small particles. Many fundamental processes occur by discrete physical movements upon each enzymatic cycle. For example, motor proteins of cytoskeleton can transport intracellular cargoes by taking nanometer-sized steps along the linear tracks within the cell. Several high precision techniques have been developed to understand the working principles and kinetics of motors in a detailed manner. This chapter summarizes the recent advances in fluorescence microscopy techniques that allow high precision tracking of biological molecules.
Keywords
- Green Fluorescent Protein
- Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer
- Point Spread Function
- Total Internal Reflection
- Diffraction Limit
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Yildiz, A. (2009). Single-Molecule Fluorescent Particle Tracking. In: Hinterdorfer, P., Oijen, A. (eds) Handbook of Single-Molecule Biophysics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76497-9_1
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