Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Vol.116, No.13, 4006-4015, 2012
Classic Maximum Entropy Recovery of the Average Joint Distribution of Apparent FRET Efficiency and Fluorescence Photons for Single-Molecule Burst Measurements
We describe a method for analysis of single-molecule Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) burst measurements using classic maximum entropy. Classic maximum entropy determines the Bayesian inference for the joint probability describing the total fluorescence photons and the apparent FRET efficiency. The method was tested with simulated data and then with DNA labeled with fluorescent dyes. The most probable joint distribution can be marginalized to obtain both the overall distribution of fluorescence photons and the apparent FRET efficiency distribution. This method proves to be ideal for determining the distance distribution of FRET-labeled biomolecules, and it successfully predicts the shape of the recovered distributions.