Simulated single molecule microscopy with SMeagol

Recent advances in single particle tracking (SPT) microscopy 1 make it possible to obtain tens of thousands macromolecular trajectories from within a living cell in just a few minutes. Since molecules typically change their movement properties upon interactions, these trajectories contain information about both locations and rates of intracellular reactions. This information is unfortunately obscured by physical limitations of the optical microscope and noise in detection systems, making statistical methods development for SPT analysis a very active research field. Unbiased testing and comparison of such methods are however difficult given the absence of in vivo data of intracellular dynamics where the true states of interaction are known, a.k.a. the ground truth. A common resort is to instead use simulated, synthetic, data. However, tests using such data give unrealistically optimistic results if the simplifying assumptions underlying the analysis method are satisfied in the synthetic data, a practice known as "inverse crimes". We here present the SMeagol (Simulated Single Molecule Microscopy) package, that has been developed to generate highly realistic single molecule microscopy time-lapse image series in order to avoid inverse crimes.