Tether
Tether is a cross-platform single-molecule FRET (smFRET) desktop suite built for the
Mondragón Lab at Northwestern University. It pairs a PySide6 application shell with an
embedded napari movie panel and pyqtgraph
trace docks, backed by a single self-describing HDF5 (.tether) project store that carries
full provenance for every datum.
New here? Start with Does Tether fit my data? — it describes the acquisition geometry and file formats Tether reads, what it deliberately does not do, and what a dataset costs in time and disk. It is the fastest way to find out whether Tether suits your experiment before you install anything.
Use the site as a route to the level of detail you need:
- Public roadmap — what the current release contains, what comes next, and what is explicitly out of scope.
- Reference — the stable project-store format, analysis parameters, exports, and command-line behavior under the Reference navigation section.
- Architecture decisions — the MADR log for the reasoning behind consequential design choices.
Modules (PRD §4.2)
| Module | Responsibility |
|---|---|
tether.io |
Readers, the HDF5 project store, the filename parser, and exporters. |
tether.imaging |
Native movie-to-trace extraction and registration. |
tether.fret |
Photobleaching detection, correction factors, and corrected FRET. |
tether.idealize |
The tMAVEN sidecar driver and dwell/rate analysis. |
tether.ml |
The per-condition incrementally-retrained quality ranker. |
tether.analysis |
Histograms, transition-density plots, and population statistics. |
tether.gui |
The PySide6 shell and dockable analysis surfaces. |
tether.project |
The experiment/session model and the headless core. |
License
Tether is free software under the GNU GPL v3.0-or-later.