deadeasy mito-glia automatic counting of mitotic cells and glial cells in drosophiladeadeasy mito-glia自动计数果蝇的有丝分裂细胞和神经胶质细胞.pdf

DeadEasy Mito-Glia: Automatic Counting of Mitotic Cells and Glial Cells in Drosophila ¤ Manuel Guillermo Forero, Anabel R. Learte , Stephanie Cartwright, Alicia Hidalgo* Neurodevelopment Group, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom Abstract Cell number changes during normal development, and in disease (e.g., neurodegeneration, cancer). Many genes affect cell number, thus functional genetic analysis frequently requires analysis of cell number alterations upon loss of function mutations or in gain of function experiments. Drosophila is a most powerful model organism to investigate the function of genes involved in development or disease in vivo. Image processing and pattern recognition techniques can be used to extract information from microscopy images to quantify automatically distinct cellular features, but these methods are still not very extended in this model organism. Thus cellular quantification is often carried out manually, which is laborious, tedious, error prone or humanly unfeasible. Here, we present DeadEasy Mito-Glia, an image processing method to count automatically the number of mitotic cells labelled with anti-phospho-histone H3 and of glial cells labelled with anti-Repo in Drosophila embryos. This programme belongs to the DeadEasy suite of which we have previously developed versions to count apoptotic cells and neuronal nuclei. Having separate programmes is paramount for accuracy. DeadEasy Mito-Glia is very easy to use, fast, objective and very accurate when counting dividing cells and glial cells labelled with a nuclear marker. Although this method has been validated for Drosophila embryos, we provide an interactive window for bio