Centre for Research on Biomolecular Interactions presents Assoc. Prof. Joshua N. Milstein, Department of Physics and Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto

Talk Title: "Counting Single Molecules Under the Microscope"

Abstract: Single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) has the potential to serve as an accurate, single-cell technique for counting the abundance of intracellular molecules. A fluorescence based approach to molecular counting would be particularly powerful in single-cell 'omics' applications where a low level, such as trace amounts of protein, DNA, or RNA, must be detected. However, the stochastic blinking of single fluorophores can introduce large uncertainties into the final count. We have developed a theoretical foundation for applying SMLM to the problem of molecular counting based on the distribution of blinking events from a single fluorophore. As an example, we apply our theory to the challenging problem of quantifying the cell-to-cell variability of plasmid copy number in bacteria.

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