A Discontinuous Galerkin Model for Fluorescence Loss in Photobleaching

Fluorescence loss in photobleaching (FLIP) is a modern microscopy method for visualization of transport processes in living cells. This paper presents the simulation of FLIP sequences based on a calibrated reaction–diffusion system defined on segmented cell images. By the use of a discontinuous Galerkin method, the computational complexity is drastically reduced compared to continuous Galerkin methods. Using this approach on green fluorescent protein (GFP), we can determine its intracellular diffusion constant, the strength of localized hindrance to diffusion as well as the permeability of the nuclear membrane for GFP passage, directly from the FLIP image series. Thus, we present for the first time, to our knowledge, a quantitative computational FLIP method for inferring several molecular transport parameters in parallel from FLIP image data acquired at commercial microscope systems.