Abstract
Understanding the cellular and mechanical processes that underlie the shape changes of individual cells and their collective behaviors in a tissue during dynamic and complex morphogenetic events is currently one of the major frontiers in developmental biology. The advent of highspeed time-lapse microscopy and its use in monitoring the cellular events in fluorescently labeled developing organisms demonstrate tremendous promise in establishing detailed descriptions of these events and could potentially provide a foundation for subsequent hypothesis-driven research strategies.However, obtaining quantitative measurements of dynamic shapes and behaviors of cells and tissues in a rapidly developing metazoan embryo using time-lapse 3D microscopy remains technically challenging, with the main hurdle being the shortage of robust imaging processing and analysis tools.We have developed EDGE4D, a software tool for segmenting and tracking membrane-labeled cells using multi-photon microscopy data. Our results demonstrate that EDGE4D enables quantification of the dynamics of cell shape changes, cell interfaces and neighbor relations at single-cell resolution during a complex epithelial folding event in the early Drosophila embryo.We expect this tool to be broadly useful for the analysis of epithelial cell geometries andmovements in a wide variety of developmental contexts.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2895-2900 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Development (Cambridge) |
Volume | 141 |
Issue number | 14 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2014 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Molecular Biology
- Developmental Biology
Keywords
- Cell shape analysis
- Cell shape reconstruction
- Cell tracking
- Drosophila melanogaster
- Epithelial folding
- Live imaging