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As camera pixel arrays have grown larger and faster, and optical microscopy techniques ever more refined, there has been an explosion in the quantity of data acquired during routine light microcopy. At the single-molecule level, analysis involves multiple steps and can rapidly become computationally expensive, in some cases intractable on office workstations. Complex bespoke software can present high activation barriers to entry for new users. Here, we redevelop our quantitative single-molecule analysis routines into an optimized and extensible Python program, with GUI and command-line implementations to facilitate use on local machines and remote clusters, by beginners and advanced users alike. We demonstrate that its performance is on par with previous MATLAB implementations but runs an order of magnitude faster. We tested it against challenge data and demonstrate its performance is comparable to state-of-the-art analysis platforms. We show the code can extract fluorescence intensity values for single reporter dye molecules and, using these, estimate molecular stoichiometries and cellular copy numbers of fluorescently-labeled biomolecules. It can evaluate 2D diffusion coefficients for the characteristically short single-particle tracking data. To facilitate benchmarking we include data simulation routines to compare different analysis programs. Finally, we show that it works with 2-color data and enables colocalization analysis based on overlap integration, to infer interactions between differently labelled biomolecules. By making this freely available we aim to make complex light microscopy single-molecule analysis more democratized.

DNA replication in all organisms must overcome nucleoprotein blocks to complete genome duplication. Accessory replicative helicases in Escherichia coli, Rep and UvrD, help replication machinery overcome blocks by removing incoming nucleoprotein complexes or aiding the re-initiation of replication. Mechanistic details of Rep function have emerged from recent live cell studies, however, the activities of UvrD in vivo remain unclear. Here, by integrating biochemical analysis and super-resolved single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, we discovered that UvrD self-associates into a tetramer and, unlike Rep, is not recruited to a specific replisome protein despite being found at approximately 80% of replication forks. By deleting rep and DNA repair factors mutS and uvrA, perturbing transcription by mutating RNA polymerase, and antibiotic inhibition; we show that the presence of UvrD at the fork is dependent on its activity. This is likely mediated by the very high frequency of replication blocks due to DNA bound proteins, including RNA polymerase, and DNA damage. UvrD is recruited to sites of nucleoprotein blocks via distinctly different mechanisms to Rep and therefore plays a more important and complementary role than previously realised in ensuring successful DNA replication.

Antibiotics such as the quinolones and fluoroquinolones kill bacterial pathogens ultimately through DNA damage. They target the essential type IIA topoisomerases in bacteria by stabilising the normally transient double strand break state which is created to modify the supercoiling state of the DNA. Here we discuss the development of these antibiotics and their method of action. Existing methods for DNA damage visualisation, such as the comet assay and immunofluorescence imaging can often only be analysed qualitatively and this analysis is subjective. We describe a putative single-molecule fluorescence technique for quantifying DNA damage via the total fluorescence intensity of a DNA origami tile fully saturated with an intercalating dye, along with the optical requirements for how to implement these into a light microscopy imaging system capable of single-molecule millisecond timescale imaging. This system promises significant improvements in reproducibility of the quantification of DNA damage over traditional techniques.

Although not laying claim to being the inventor of the light microscope, Antonj van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was arguably the first person to bring this new technological wonder of the age properly to the attention of natural scientists interested in the study of living things (people we might now term 'biologists'). He was a Dutch draper with no formal scientific training. From using magnifying glasses to observe threads in cloth, he went on to develop over 500 simple single lens microscopes (Baker & Leeuwenhoek 1739 Phil. Trans. 41, 503-519. (doi:10.1098/rstl.1739.0085)) which he used to observe many different biological samples. He communicated his finding to the Royal Society in a series of letters (Leeuwenhoek 1800 The select works of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, containing his microscopical discoveries in many of the works of nature, vol. 1) including the one republished in this edition of Open Biology. Our review here begins with the work of van Leeuwenhoek before summarizing the key developments over the last ca 300 years, which has seen the light microscope evolve from a simple single lens device of van Leeuwenhoek's day into an instrument capable of observing the dynamics of single biological molecules inside living cells, and to tracking every cell nucleus in the development of whole embryos and plants.