Eitan Lerner edited Abstract.tex  over 9 years ago

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Single-molecule FRET (smFRET) allows probing intermolecular interactions and conformational changes in biomacromolecules, and represent an invaluable tool in studying cellular processes on the molecular scale\cite{Kapanidis_2006}. smFRET experiments can detect the distance between two fluorescent labels (\textit{donor} and \textit{acceptor}) in the 3-10 nm range. In the commonly employed confocal geometry, molecules are free to diffuse in a solution. When a molecule traverses the excitation volume it emits a burst of photons that can be detected by single-photon detectors (SPADs).   The relative intensities of signals from donor and acceptor fluorescence are related to the distance between the two dyes.  smFRET experiments are sometimes considered complex to properly analyze.  The analysis of smFRET experiments involves identifyingthe  photon bursts from single-molecules in a continuous stream of photon timestamps, estimating the background and other correction factors, filtering and extracting the corrected FRET efficiencies for each sub-populations sub-population  in the sample. In this paper order to ease the process,  we herein  present FRETBursts, a new software for smFRET data analysis that includes most of the common state-of-the-art algorithms. We follow the highest standard in software development to ensure that the free  source is easy to read, well documented and thoroughly tested. Moreover, in an effort to lower the barriers to computational reproducibility, we embrace a modern workflow based on ipython notebooks that allowsto  capture of  the whole process from raw data to figures within a single document.