Introduction

Tracking single molecules has many applications in the fields of biophysics and cell biology. Among the most promising is the observation of intracellular molecular dynamics.

Main Contribution

We have developed a robust algorithm for tracking a single fluorescent particle in dynamic image sequences obtained by brightfield or confocal microscopy. Specifically, we have considered the problem of extracting the movement of a fluorescently labeled chromosomal telomere within the nucleus of a budding yeast cell. Our method has three components

1. an alignment module that compensates for the movement of the biological structure under investigation;
2. an enhancement of particle-like structures by Mexican-hat filtering;
3. a tracking module that uses dynamic programming to extract the optimal trajectory of the particle.

The experimental results obtained are quite promising.