{"doi":"10.1101/2025.10.31.685671","title":"An Accessible Python Framework for Real-Time Magnetic Tweezers Microscope Control and Image Processing","abstract":"Magnetic tweezers are a popular biophysical instrument for manipulating and measuring single molecules. Most groups rely on custom-built setups tailored to specific experiments, making it challenging to implement and share software. Typically, image acquisition and hardware control are automated via LabVIEW, while real-time video processing is implemented in C++/CUDA libraries. Live processing can eliminate the need to store raw video, enabling high throughput, fast acquisition rates, and simplified experimental workflows. However, no open-source general-purpose software framework currently unifies these capabilities for magnetic tweezers experiments. Here, we introduce MagTrack and MagScope open-source Python-based tools designed to fill this gap. MagTrack is an image-processing library that efficiently determines bead-positions from magnetic-tweezers videos using CPU and/or GPU computation. MagScope is a comprehensive software framework offering a graphical user interface, real-time hardware control, data acquisition, and video processing. It is built on a multiprocessing architecture for responsive, high-throughput computation. Together, MagTrack and MagScope offer a fully customizable, end-to-end, open-source Python alternative to proprietary or fragmented systems, enabling laboratories to adapt and extend the framework according to their experimental needs.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2025,"id":559428,"datarank":0.10397207708399181,"base_score":0.6931471805599453,"endowment":0.6931471805599453,"self_citation_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9553,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":884866,"name":"Abhishek Singh","orcid":"0000-0003-3895-198X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1461255,"name":"Teague C. Svendsen","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1460651,"name":"Naciye Esma Tirtom","orcid":"0000-0003-4637-8466","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1461256,"name":"Zachary A. Root","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":77388,"name":"Richard Fishel","orcid":"0000-0001-8753-2269","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":796871,"name":"James London","orcid":"0000-0003-2638-0868","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":23,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:34.849815Z","pmid":"41279331","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}