Piecewise-linear approximation of cargo paths

We would like to infer the behavior of the molecular motors that transport the cargo, but because the motor heads are so small (~ 5 nm) they cannot be observed directly in live cells. Meanwhile, intracellular cargo can be quite large and “easily” visualized. The compromise is that diffusion is rapid and the observations are noisy compared to the speed of the walking motors.

Over the last decade graduate students Melanie Jensen and Linh Do and postdoc Keisha Cook have worked to develop a changepoint algorithm and inference protocol for automatically segmenting paths and reporting a “best-fit” piecewise linear approximation of cargo paths.