title: SCMD: Saccharomyces cerevisiae Morphological Database.
abstract: To study the global regulation of cell morphology, a number of groups have recently reported genome-wide screening data for yeast mutants with abnormal morphology. Despite the relatively simple ellipsoidal shape of yeast cells, in the past, cell morphology researchers have processed information on cells manually. These time-consuming, entirely subjective tasks motivated us to develop image-processing software that automatically extracts yeast cells from micrographs and processes them to measure key morphological characteristics such as cell size, roundness, bud neck position angle, nuclear DNA localization and actin localization. To date, we have retrieved 960,609 cells from 52,988 micrographs of 2531 mutants using our software, and we have published the results in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Morphological Database (SCMD), which facilitates the analysis of abnormal cells. Our system provides quantitative data for shapes of the daughter and mother cells, localization of the nuclear DNA and morphology of the actin patches. To search for mutants with similar morphological traits, the system outputs a list of mutants ranked by similarity of average morphological parameters. The SCMD is available at http://yeast. gi.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
authors.forename: Taro L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Saito
authors.forename: Miwaka
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ohtani
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sawai
authors.forename: Fumi
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Sano
authors.forename: Ayaka
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Saka
authors.forename: Daisuke
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Watanabe
authors.forename: Masashi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yukawa
authors.forename: Yoshikazu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ohya
authors.forename: Shinichi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Morishita
mesh_terms: D002453:Cell Cycle; D016208:Databases, Factual; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D020407:Internet; D009154:Mutation; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000166:cytology* / Q000235:genetics*; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface