INVESTIGADORES
MOCSKOS Esteban Eduardo
artículos
Título:
Exploring the dynamics of cell processes through Monte Carlo simulations of advanced fluorescence microscopy experiments
Autor/es:
J. ANGIOLINI; N. PLACHTA; E. MOCSKOS; V. LEVI
Revista:
BIOPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Editorial:
CELL PRESS
Referencias:
Lugar: United States; Año: 2015 vol. 108 p. 2613 - 2618
ISSN:
0006-3495
Resumen:
Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) methods are powerful tools to unveil the dynamical organization of cells. For simple cases such as molecules passively moving in a homogeneous media, the FCS analysis yields analytical functions that can be fitted to the experimental data in order to recover the phenomenological rate parameters. Unfortunately, many dynamical processes in cells do not follow these simple models and in many instances it is not possible to obtain an analytical function through the theoretical analysis of a more complex model. In those cases, the experimental analysis can be combined with Monte Carlo simulations to help with the interpretation of the data.In response to this need, we develop here FERNET (Fluorescence Emission Recipes and Numerical routines Toolkit) a method based on Monte Carlo simulations and the MCell-Blender platform which was designed to treat the reaction-diffusion problem under realistic scenarios. This method enables us to set complex geometries of the simulation space, distribute molecules between different compartments and define interspecies reactions with selected kinetic constants, diffusion coefficient and species brightness. We apply this method to simulate single- and multiple-point FCS, photon counting histogram analysis, raster image correlation spectroscopy and two-color fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy. We believe that this new program could be very useful to predict and understand the output of fluorescence microscopy experiments.