September 11, 2014

As your therapist likely tells you, understanding where you came from is key to accepting where you are now. Take that therapist’s task and multiply it by several million—you now understand the tough job ahead of developmental biologists trying to track cell lineages in complex organisms. Today’s colorful image is from a paper describing a new computational framework for reconstructing cell lineages. 

The successful tracking of cell position, division, and movement in a developing organism has been a goal for countless developmental biologists. Reconstructing cell lineages in organisms like fruit flies and mice, however, is difficult due to the complexity of cell organization and behavior, poor image quality of thick embryos, the enormous size of the data sets, and an uncompromising need for accuracy. A recent paper by Amat and colleagues describes the development and use of a new open-source framework that reconstructs cell lineages with high accuracy and speed. Their system uses four dimensional and terabyte-sized image data sets of nuclei-tracked embryos, imaged using three different types of fluorescence microscopy. The images above show the first reconstruction of early fruit fly nervous system development (S1 neuroblasts), with precursor cell tracks color-coded for time (purple to yellow).

Amat, F., Lemon, W., Mossing, D., McDole, K., Wan, Y., Branson, K., Myers, E., & Keller, P. (2014). Fast, accurate reconstruction of cell lineages from large-scale fluorescence microscopy data Nature Methods, 11 (9), 951-958 DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.3036
Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd, copyright ©2014