The transport of particles in cells is influenced by the properties of
intracellular networks they traverse while searching for localized target
regions or reaction partners. Moreover, given the rapid turnover in many
intracellular structures, it is crucial to understand how temporal changes in
the network structure affect diffusive transport. In this work, we use network
theory to characterize complex intracellular biological environments across
scales. We develop an efficient computational method to compute the mean first
passage times for simulating a particle diffusing along two-dimensional planar
networks extracted from fluorescence microscopy imaging. We first benchmark
this methodology in the context of synthetic networks, and subsequently apply
it to live-cell data from endoplasmic reticulum tubular networks.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure