[dekhn]

My friend in grad school was in Ron's group. He built a microscope that visualized individual kinesin molecules and measured their speed using fluorescent labelling. The whole thing was held together with a bunch of scripts written in LabView. Ron had oodles of money and was able to support long-term software development of open source software like MicroManager, which gives a common interface to a wide range of microscopy software.

The systems he studies are literally little motors that can attach to biological surfaces and drive around in specific directions, pick up payloads, and then drive to other places. They work in very different way from how humans engineer tiny motors and understanding/engineering their behavior was a major focus in the early 2000s.

[shagie]

> My friend in grad school was in Ron's group. He built a microscope that visualized individual kinesin molecules and measured their speed using fluorescent labelling.

In vitro motility of yeast cytoplasmic dynein - https://youtu.be/lVwKiWSu8XE?si=Su29neym0wg9DalR&t=627

[dekhn]

Yeah, exactly that, but with kinesin instead of dynein (everybody started with myosin, but loss interest, and moved to kinesin and then dynein) and about 10 years earlier.

Those little blobs moving along the filaments are ~10-100 nanometers, you wouldn't normally be able to see them, but they managed to tether fluorescent (glowing) molecules to them and those act like point sources of light, which allows for precise localization because the PSF of a point is approximately gaussian and finding the centroid of a gaussian is trivial.