Automated and Robust Quantification of Colocalization in Dual-Color Fluorescence Microscopy: A Nonparametric Statistical Approach

摘要

Colocalization is a powerful tool to study the interactions betweenfluorescently labeled molecules in biological fluorescence microscopy. However,existing techniques for colocalization analysis have not undergone continueddevelopment especially in regards to robust statistical support. In this paper,we examine two of the most popular quantification techniques for colocalizationand argue that they could be improved upon using ideas from nonparametricstatistics and scan statistics. In particular, we propose a new colocalizationmetric that is robust, easily implementable, and optimal in a rigorousstatistical testing framework. Application to several benchmark datasets, aswell as biological examples, further demonstrates the usefulness of theproposed technique.