Bayesian counting of photobleaching steps with physical priors.

Counting fluorescence photobleaching steps is commonly used to infer the number n of monomeric units of individual oligomeric protein complexes or misfolded protein aggregates. We present a principled Bayesian approach for counting that incorporates the statistics of photobleaching. Our physics-based prior leads to a simple and efficient numerical scheme for maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimates of the initial fluorophore number n^.