UVictoria Maud Menten Institute /Mathematical and Statistical Biology Seminar: Scott McKinley

There is now an expansive collection of mathematical work on building models for the transport of intracellular cargo by molecular motors. Commonly studied cargo undergo “saltatory” motion (bidirectional ballistic motion, intermixed with periods of stationarity) along often unobserved microtubules. Traditionally microparticle transport is quantified in terms of mean-squared displacement, but this ubiquitous statistic averages over periods of motion and pauses, eliminating important biophysical information. In this talk, I will discuss our group’s approach to segmentation analysis: an in-house changepoint detection algorithm coupled with a focus on summary statistics that are robust with respect to the inevitable mistakes that changepoint detections algorithms make.