Tag: Laura Pérez García

Optical force field reconstruction using Brownian trajectories
Laura Pérez García, Jaime Donlucas Pérez, Giorgio Volpe, Alejandro V. Arzola & Giovanni Volpe

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Twitter Link: here.

Optical tweezers have evolved into sophisticated tools for the measurement and application of nanoscopic forces; its use ranges from mechanobiology to cooling and trapping atoms.
Despite their ever-growing interest, the methods employed to measure optical forces have not changed much in the last 30 years. The key methods measure the potential function, the autocorrelation function (ACF), or the power spectral density (PSD) of an optically trapped particle’s motion. Unfortunately, all these techniques have some drawbacks: they require large amounts of data acquired for long times (potential) or at high frequency (ACF and PSD); they cannot identify non-conservative force-field components; they can only measure the properties of stable equilibrium positions, and they require setting several parameters carefully and expertly [1]. These shortcomings have limited the possibility of measuring nanoscopic forces in many potential applications, such as experiments with non-conservative force fields and out-of-equilibrium conditions.

We have recently introduced a simple, robust, and fast algorithm that permits to reconstruct microscopic force fields from Brownian trajectories, Force Reconstruction via Maximum-likelihood-estimator Analysis — FORMA. FORMA exploits the fact that in the proximity of an equilibrium position, the force field can be approximated by a linear form, and therefore, optimally estimated using a linear maximum-likelihood-estimator. Its key advantages are that FORMA does not require setting analysis parameters, it executes orders-of-magnitude faster than other more standard methods, and it requires ten times fewer data to achieve the same precision and accuracy. Finally, FORMA also permits the characterization of non-conservative force fields and non-stable equilibrium positions in extended force fields [2].

References:

[1] Jones et al. Optical tweezers: Principles and applications. Cambridge, 2015.
[2] L. Pérez García, et al. Nat. Commun. 9, 5166 (2018).

Poster Session
Time: June 22nd 2020
Place: Twitter

POM Conference
Link: POM
Time: June 25th 2020
Place: Online

Poster Slides

FORMA: Force Reconstruction via Maximum-likelihood-estimator Analysis

Laura Pérez García, Jaime Donlucas Pérez, Giorgio Volpe, Alejandro V. Areola & Giovanni Volpe
OSA Biophotonics Congress, Tucson (AZ), USA
16 April 2019

Microscopic force characterization is often done by using a microscopic colloidal particle which probes local forces. These particles are often held by a harmonic trapping potential with stiffness k so that a homogeneous force acting on the particle results in a displacement Δx from the equilibrium position and the force can, therefore, be measured as k Δx . To perform such measurement, it is necessary to determine the value of k , which is often done by measuring the Brownian fluctuations of the particle around its stable equilibrium position. This is achieved by measuring the particle position as a function of time, x (t) , and then using some calibration algorithms; the most commonly employed techniques are the potential analysis that relies on the fact that the force is derived from a potential; and the power spectral density (PSD) and the auto-correlation function (ACF) methods that require a regular sampling in time. Besides the previous requirements, all methods depend on the choice of some analysis parameters. This has inhibited the applicability of force measurement methods to characterize force fields with non-conservative components or where the particle freely explores an extended potential landscape. We propose a method for Force Reconstruction via Maximum-likelihood-estimator Analysis (FORMA) that exploits the fact that in the proximity of an equilibrium position the force field can be approximated by a linear form and, therefore, optimally estimated using a linear Maximum-likelihood-estimator (MLE).

Session: Biological Applications
10:30 AM–12:00 AM, Tuesday, April 16, 2019

More information can be found on the link: https://www.osapublishing.org/abstract.cfm?uri=OMA-2019-AT2E.2