From live cell fluorescence microscopy to moment-based variational inference

Characterization of biomolecular circuit components is important for the design of novel synthetic biology applications. Reliable models of such components need to account for intrinsic and extrinsic noise present in the cellular environment. Stochastic kinetic models provide a principled framework for developing quantitatively predictive tools in this scenario. Calibration of such models requires an experimental setup capable of monitoring a large number of individual cells over time, automatic extraction of fluorescence levels for each cell and a scalable inference approach. In the first part of the talk we will cover our microfluidic setup and a deep-learning based approach to cell segmentation and data extraction. The second part will introduce moment-based variational inference as a scalable framework for approximate inference of kinetic models based on single cell data.