A high-speed magnetic tweezer beyond 10,000 frames per second

Abstract

The magnetic tweezer is a single-molecule instrument that can apply a constant force to a biomolecule over a range of extensions, and is therefore an ideal tool to study biomolecules and their interactions. However, the video-based tracking inherent to most magnetic single-molecule instruments has traditionally limited the instrumental resolution to a few nanometers, above the length scale of single DNA base-pairs. Here we have introduced superluminescent diode illumination and high-speed camera detection to the magnetic tweezer, with graphics processing unit-accelerated particle tracking for high-speed analysis of video files. We have demonstrated the ability of the high-speed magnetic tweezer to resolve particle position to within 1 Å at 100 Hz, and to measure the extension of a 1566 bp DNA with 1 nm precision at 100 Hz in the presence of thermal noise.