A discontinuous Galerkin model for fluorescence loss in photobleaching of intracellular polyglutamine protein aggregates.

Background: Intracellular phase separation and aggregation of proteins with extended poly-glutamine (polyQ) stretches are hallmarks of various age-associated neurodegenerative diseases. Progress in our understanding of such processes heavily relies on quantitative fluorescence imaging of suitably tagged proteins. Fluorescence loss in photobleaching (FLIP) is particularly well-suited to study the dynamics of protein aggregation in cellular models of Chorea Huntington and other polyQ diseases, as FLIP gives access to the full spatio-temporal profile of intensity changes in the cell geometry.

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.