Exact occupation probabilities for intermittent transport and application to image correlation spectroscopy

Intermittent transport is frequently observed in nature and has been proven to accelerate search processes at both the macroscopic (e.g., animals looking for food) and microscopic scale (e.g., protein-DNA interactions). In living cells, active transport of membrane proteins (e.g., membrane receptors) or intracellular vesicles (organelles) has been extensively studied as an example of intermittent behavior. The intermittent stochastic process is commonly analyzed in terms of first-passage probabilities. Here we derive exact occupation probabilities of intermittent active transport, making such analysis available for image correlation spectroscopy techniques. The power of this new theoretical framework is demonstrated on intracellular trafficking of lipid/DNA nanoparticles in living cells for which we were allowed to quantify switching time scales.