Easyworm

PRESENTATION

 

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Easyworm is a very cool and easy-to-handle software tool that analyzes the shape fluctuations of semi-flexible polymers and provides accurate measurements of their persistence lengths. A complete set of additional tools is provided, including the derivation of the Young’s modulus.

 


REFERENCE

Lamour G., JB. Kirkegaard, HB. Li, TPJ. Knowles, and J. Gsponer. Easyworm: an open-source software tool to determine the mechanical properties of worm-like chains. SOURCE CODE BIOL MED. 2014; 9:16

 


NEWS & NOTES

[Dec. 16 2015] A beta version of the code is available for those interested. Contact me directly at the email address mentioned at the bottom of this page and I’ll send it to you. Basically the beta code samples much more points than before along the parametric spline that fits the contour of fibrils. Pros: improves the statistics greatly, and suppress some artifacts observed at very low values of inner contour length. Cons: number of sampled points per fibril is roughly the same no matter what the length of the fibril is, so it could bias the analysis by giving more weight to short fibrils at short contour lengths. That could easily be fixed by normalizing the number of sampled coordinates by the contour length, but I don’t really have time to do that now. Which is why this version will remain beta until further notice.

[Aug. 13 2015] Got some feedback about an image loading problem. Please note that if loading an image file (e.g. .jpg or .tiff), the Image Color Mode must be RGB, even if it looks grayscale. If coded in grayscale mode, the image will not load properly. Mainly affected would probably be those loading electron microscopy images, since these ones are typically coded in grayscale directly. In this case, there is only one solution at present, change the Color Mode to RGB. This can be done easily in Photoshop under the Image tab (-> Mode -> RGB Color). Otherwise, print your screen with your image displayed, crop it to make a square, and paste it in any image software. The color mode should be RGB by default (works fine with Irfanview).

 


INSTALLATION NOTES

To use Easyworm, it is necessary that you install the Matlab Compiler Runtime (MCR) first (except if you have Matlab already installed and plan to work with the source code only). Make sure that you install the version that corresponds to your operating system, currently supported operating system is Windows 10 with Matlab 2020a or Matlab 2012b for Linux64.

 


STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS (INSTALL AND EXECUTE)

1. Download the source or binaries for Linux64 and Windows 10 64-bit, requires both the MCR and the Easyworm software suite.

Windows & Linux 64-bit:

Easyworm recompiled with Matlab 2020a 64bit under windows 10 and Matlab 2012b 64bit for Linux.

Downloading the MCR directly on Mathworks’s website. However, since backwards compatibility issues are highly probable, it is very strongly advised to use only the versions as indicated with which Easyworm have been compiled (i.e. those available here, or equivalent versions on Mathworks website, and not the most recent ones).

2. Clone or download the source for Github.  How to tutorial: https://help.github.com/en/articles/cloning-a-repository

3. Install the MCR first.

  • Under Windows, all you need to do is run the MCR installer (you need administrative rights).
  • Under Linux, you should not need to login as root or be in super user mode, just cd to the uncompressed MCR_installer folder and type ./install in the command line, that should work. Then follow the instructions that come to screen. If you get the message ‘permission denied’ after typing ./install, that probably means you downloaded the file or copied it from a Windows machine. In this case, re-download the MCR_installer and try to install it, but doing all steps under Linux system only.

4. Run Easyworm.

  • Under Windows, all you have to do is double-click on the executable file (e.g. Easyworm1.exe).

5. Both the source code for Easyworm and some example files are included in the Easyworm software package:

  • The source code will work only under the Matlab environment.
  • Example files include images of 3 different sets of polymers (2 experimental and 1 synthetic) with 3 distinct persistence lengths: 52 nm, 1.5 um, and 100 um. These can be used for testing and training purposes; that is, if you analyze the same sets and do not find a similar persistence length, it means you made a mistake during the analysis.

 


CONTACT

If you encounter any trouble to download the files, install Easyworm, or just to use it, please send an email to: lamour99 [at] hotmail.com and I will try to help.

 

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