Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Tutzing 2026

Single-Molecule FRET: The Next 30 Years

Poster Abstracts

22-POS Board 12 SMFBURSTS: A PYTHON PACKAGE FOR REPRODUCIBLE CONFOCAL SINGLE MOLECULE ANALYSIS Paul D. Harris 1 ; 1 TU Dortmund, Chemical Biology, Dortmund, Germany SmfBursts provides a unified platform for precise analysis of single molecule confocal data from a variety of modalities. Methods for single molecule florescence have expanded greatly over the past decades. In particular multiple spectral, and polarization channels may be combined with multiple interleaved excitations. While providing a wealth of information, this has resulted in each research group creating specialized software packages, and thus difficulty in communicating and reproducing analysis between research groups. SmfBursts is a open python package that implements most of the standard techniques for burst-based single molecule analysis, while accepting arbitrary numbers of excitation (both continuous as well as pulsed), emission wavelength, polarization, and even split channels. Thus making it highly generalizable. This is coupled with a robust system for displaying analysis parameters in a tabular form, and saving them as a binary file. This makes communication and replication of precise analysis methods simple. Finally, it implements a robust system for extension. New parameters can be defined with simple subclasses, making newly developed analysis methods simple to implement within the existing framework.

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