An automatic procedure for evaluation of single cell motility

Abstract

Background: Cell motility is vital in many physiological and pathological processes, such as embryogenesis, inflammation, wound healing, and metastasis. However, the time-consuming step in the evaluation of individual cell motility is the analysis of hundreds of recorded images of cell cultures in general consisting of retrieving images, one at a time, and marking the positions of individual cells by a computer mouse. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to develop a novel automatic procedure for the evaluation of cell motility. Materials and Methods: The procedure was tested on fibroblasts and glioma and adenocarcinoma cells engineered to express the green fluorescent protein by either transient transfection or adenovirus transduction, allowing automatic recognition of cell coordinates on retrieved images.

RhoA- and Actin-Dependent Functions of Macrophages from the Rodent Cardiac Transplantation Model Perspective -Timing Is the Essence

“…The forward movement of the macrophages occurs in several steps: the extension of the lamellipodia at the leading edge, strengthening the adhesion to the substrate at the front, translocation of the cell body, disassembly of adhesions and retraction of the trailing end, and finally recycling of the membrane and receptors from the rear to the front [47,48]. Cell morphology and motility depend on the actin-cytoskeleton regulated by Rho GTPases, including RhoA.…”

Analysis and modelling of motility of cell populations with MotoCell

“…Cell tracking algorithms may not be as accurate as manual recording, but require less time and may be used for the analysis of a large number of cells. They use simple methods which calculate the position assumed by a labelled cell or the nucleus, after segmenting the image on the basis of intensity [ 11 ], or with more sophisticated methods, where subsequent deformations of an initial contour model are used to identify cell boundaries in the next frames [ 12 ]. Paths are typically described by list of coordinates corresponding to the trail followed by moving cells, and are subsequently analyzed in order to extract descriptive parameters.…”