DBBM Dipartimento di Biochimica e Biotecnologie Mediche, Universita' di Napoli FEDERICO II, Via S. Pansini 5, Naples, Italy.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2009 Oct 15;10 Suppl 12(Suppl 12):S12. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-S12-S12.
Cell motility plays a central role in development, wound-healing and tumour invasion. Cultures of eukaryotic cells are a complex system where most cells move according to 'random' patterns, but may also be induced to a more coordinate migration by means of specific stimuli, such as the presence of chemical attractants or the introduction of a mechanical stimulus. Various tools have been developed that work by keeping track of the paths followed by specific objects and by performing statistical analysis on the recorded path data. The available tools include desktop applications or macros running within a commercial package, which address specific aspects of the process.
An online application, MotoCell, was developed to evaluate the motility of cell populations maintained in various experimental conditions. Statistical analysis of cell behaviour consists of the evaluation of descriptive parameters such as average speed and angle, directional persistence, path vector length, calculated for the whole population as well as for each cell and for each step of the migration; in this way the behaviour of a whole cell population may be assessed as a whole or as a sum of individual entities. The directional movement of objects may be studied by eliminating the modulo effect in circular statistics analysis, able to evaluate linear dispersion coefficient (R) and angular dispersion (S) values together with average angles. A case study is provided where the system is used to characterize motility of RasV12 transformed NIH3T3 fibroblasts.
Here we describe a comprehensive tool which takes care of all steps in cell motility analysis, including interactive cell tracking, path editing and statistical analysis of cell movement, all within a freely available online service. Although based on a standard web interface, the program is very fast and interactive and is immediately available to a large number of users, while exploiting the web approach in a very effective way. The ability to evaluate the behaviour of single cells allows to draw the attention on specific correlations, such as linearity of movement and deviation from the expected direction. In addition to population statistics, the analysis of single cells allows to group the cells into subpopulations, or even to evaluate the behaviour of each cell with respect to a variable reference, such as the direction of a wound or the position of the closest cell.
细胞运动在发育、创伤愈合和肿瘤侵袭中起着核心作用。真核细胞培养是一个复杂的系统，其中大多数细胞根据“随机”模式运动，但也可以通过特定刺激（如化学引诱物的存在或机械刺激的引入）被诱导更协调地迁移。已经开发了各种工具，通过跟踪特定物体的路径并对记录的路径数据进行统计分析来工作。现有的工具包括在商业软件包中运行的桌面应用程序或宏，它们针对该过程的特定方面。
开发了一个在线应用程序 MotoCell，用于评估维持在各种实验条件下的细胞群体的运动性。细胞行为的统计分析包括评估描述性参数，例如整个群体以及每个细胞和迁移的每个步骤的平均速度和角度、方向持久性、路径向量长度；通过这种方式，可以评估整个细胞群体的行为作为整体或作为个体实体的总和。通过消除循环统计分析中的模效应，可以研究物体的定向运动，能够一起评估线性分散系数（R）和角度分散（S）值以及平均角度。提供了一个案例研究，其中系统用于表征 RasV12 转化的 NIH3T3 成纤维细胞的运动性。
在这里，我们描述了一种全面的工具，它涵盖了细胞运动分析的所有步骤，包括交互式细胞跟踪、路径编辑和细胞运动的统计分析，所有这些都在一个免费提供的在线服务中。尽管基于标准的 Web 界面，但该程序非常快速和交互，并且可以立即供大量用户使用，同时以非常有效的方式利用 Web 方法。评估单个细胞行为的能力可以引起对特定相关性的关注，例如运动的线性和偏离预期方向。除了群体统计数据外，对单个细胞的分析还可以将细胞分为亚群，甚至可以根据变量参考（例如伤口的方向或最近细胞的位置）评估每个细胞的行为。
