Particle tracking with application to the trafficking of synaptic receptors :

Particle tracking is an optical microscopy based technique that can probe very small changes in the dynamics of microscopic objects. However, the information required to make use of this powerful tool is widely scattered in the scientific literature. The purpose of my thesis is to develop a comprehensive approach for single-particle tracking applied to the lateral diffusion of synaptic receptors. This thesis will describe the proper use of particle tracking including the description of how particle tracking algorithms are able to extract trajectories of particles from a set of consecutive digital time series images. Second, several methods to extract coefficients of motion from the trajectories will also be described, followed by a statistical analysis to determine the precision of the measured coefficients. Finally the application of particle tracking to measure the motion of synaptic receptors on the dendritic membrane of neurons will be presented. Overall, this document is a useful, up-to-date and concise thesis for biophysicists and molecular biologists who are interested in using particle tracking to measure the transport properties of membrane receptors using from time series microscopy images