Observing Behaviors of Individuals in an Ensemble - The Technique and Application of Single Particle Tracking

摘要

The peculiar aspect of the single particle tracking technique is that it enables us to visualize the temporal movements of individual molecules in space and therefore to know the type of movement, the velocity, and motional areas. This technique has illustrated many interesting biological processes such as the transportations of molecular motors, the penetration processes of a virus through cell membrane, the diffusion of protein and lipid molecules on membrane and etc. In this report, we describe the details about this technique, including the experimental setup, the detection concerns, the choices of labeling fluorophores, and the comparison of different methods. We use the experimental results of single dye tracking of lipid motions on an artificial membrane for demonstration of this technique.