Two new FRET imaging measures: Linearly proportional to and highly contrasting the fraction of active molecules

Abstract

We developed two new FRET imaging measures for intramolecular FRET biosensors, called linearly proportional (LP) and highly contrasting (HC) measures, which can be easily calculated by the fluorescence intensities of donor and acceptor as a ratio between their weighted sums. As an alternative to the conventional ratiometric measure, which non-linearly depends on the fraction of active molecule, we first developed the LP measure, which is linearly proportional to the fraction of active molecules. The LP measure inherently unmixes bleed-through signals and is robust against fluorescence noise. By extending the LP measure, we furthermore designed the HC measure, which provides highly contrasting images of the molecular activity, more than the ratiometric measure. In addition to their advantages, these measures are insensitive to the biosensor expression level, which is a fundamental property of the ratiometric measure. Using artificial data and FRET imaging data, we showed that the LP measure effectively represents the fraction of active molecules and that the HC measure improves visual interpretability by providing high contrast images of molecular activity. Therefore, the LP and HC measures allow us to gain more quantitative and qualitative insights from FRET imaging than the ratiometric measure.