Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 999077, China.
Center for Quantitative Biology, Peking University, 100871, Beijing, China.
Nat Commun. 2020 Dec 7;11(1):6254. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19863-x.
The invariant development and transparent body of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans enables complete delineation of cell lineages throughout development. Despite extensive studies of cell division, cell migration and cell fate differentiation, cell morphology during development has not yet been systematically characterized in any metazoan, including C. elegans. This knowledge gap substantially hampers many studies in both developmental and cell biology. Here we report an automatic pipeline, CShaper, which combines automated segmentation of fluorescently labeled membranes with automated cell lineage tracing. We apply this pipeline to quantify morphological parameters of densely packed cells in 17 developing C. elegans embryos. Consequently, we generate a time-lapse 3D atlas of cell morphology for the C. elegans embryo from the 4- to 350-cell stages, including cell shape, volume, surface area, migration, nucleus position and cell-cell contact with resolved cell identities. We anticipate that CShaper and the morphological atlas will stimulate and enhance further studies in the fields of developmental biology, cell biology and biomechanics.
秀丽隐杆线虫（Caenorhabditis elegans）具有不变的发育和透明的身体，这使其能够在整个发育过程中完整描绘细胞谱系。尽管对细胞分裂、细胞迁移和细胞命运分化进行了广泛的研究，但在包括秀丽隐杆线虫在内的任何后生动物中，其发育过程中的细胞形态尚未得到系统描述。这一知识空白严重阻碍了发育生物学和细胞生物学领域的许多研究。在这里，我们报告了一个自动流水线 CShaper，它将荧光标记膜的自动分割与自动细胞谱系追踪相结合。我们将该流水线应用于在 17 个发育中的秀丽隐杆线虫胚胎中定量分析密集堆积细胞的形态参数。因此，我们生成了秀丽隐杆线虫胚胎从 4 细胞到 350 细胞阶段的延时 3D 细胞形态图谱，包括细胞形状、体积、表面积、迁移、核位置和细胞-细胞接触，同时解析了细胞身份。我们预计 CShaper 和形态图谱将激发和促进发育生物学、细胞生物学和生物力学领域的进一步研究。
