Topino: A Graphical Tool for Quantitative Assessment of Molecular Stream Separations

In molecular-stream separation (MSS), a stream of a multi-component mixture is separated into multiple streams of individual components inside a thin rectangular chamber. Despite great potential and many years of work on MSS, its analysis was underdeveloped until recently. To fill in this gap, we introduced a novel and convenient way to assess MSS by convoluting the separation zone into a simple 2D plot called angulagram. We implemented and publicly shared Python programs for the generation of angulagrams. However, we realized that Python programs create two hurdles (setting up a resembling Python environment and using a command line interface) for other researchers to try out and adopt this new approach. To make our approach more accessible to the MSS community, we introduce and present here the open-source software Topino for quantitative assessment of MSS. Topino is a user-friendly, accessible program with a graphical user interface that allows the user to assess MSS data in a fast and straightforward way (less than 2\ min). The software is available at https://github.com/Schallaven/topino.