Rapid and facile reconstruction of time-resolved fluorescence data with exponentially modified Gaussians

Abstract: Analyte response is convoluted with instrument response in time resolved fluorescence data. Decoding the desired analyte information from the measurement usually requires iterative numerical convolutions. Here in, we show that time resolved data can be completely, analytically reconstructed without numerical convolutions. Our strategy relies on a summation of exponentially modified Gaussians which encode all convolutions within easily evaluated complementary error functions. Compared to a numerical convolution strategy implemented with Python, this new method is computationally cheaper and scales less steeply with the number of temporal points in the experimental dataset.