Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, 2-2-3 Minatojima-minamimachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi, Hyogo-ken 650-0047, Japan Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Moffett Laboratory 435, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Development. 2014 Jul;141(14):2895-900. doi: 10.1242/dev.107730. Epub 2014 Jun 19.
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 high-speed 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 and movements in a wide variety of developmental contexts.
理解单个细胞在动态和复杂形态发生事件中形状变化的细胞和机械过程及其在组织中的集体行为，是目前发育生物学的主要前沿领域之一。高速延时显微镜的出现及其在监测荧光标记的发育生物体内细胞事件中的应用，为详细描述这些事件提供了巨大的潜力，并可能为随后的基于假设的研究策略提供基础。然而，使用延时 3D 显微镜获取快速发育的后生动物胚胎中细胞和组织的动态形状和行为的定量测量仍然具有技术挑战性，主要障碍是缺乏强大的成像处理和分析工具。我们开发了 EDGE4D，这是一种用于使用多光子显微镜数据分割和跟踪细胞膜标记细胞的软件工具。我们的结果表明，EDGE4D 能够在早期果蝇胚胎中复杂的上皮折叠事件期间以单细胞分辨率量化细胞形状变化、细胞界面和相邻关系的动力学。我们预计这个工具将广泛用于分析各种发育背景下的上皮细胞几何形状和运动。
