title: Practical guide of live imaging for developmental biologists.
abstract: Time-lapse imaging of fluorescent proteins in living cells has become an indispensable tool in biological sciences. However, its application at the organismal level still faces a number of obstacles, such as large specimen sizes preventing illumination of internal tissues, high background fluorescence and uncontrollable movement of target tissues or embryos. Here we describe our solutions for these issues to obtain 4-D fluorescent images from living Drosophila embryos using confocal microscopes. A computational procedure that detects and corrects the shift of moving objects to virtually stabilize them in time-lapse movies (iSEMS) is presented. We discuss the importance of postimaging treatment of raw image stacks for the discovery of novel phenotypes that have previously escaped attention from the analyses of fixed specimens.
authors.affiliation: Riken Center for Developmental Biology, Kobe, Japan.
authors.forename: Kagayaki
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.forename: Shigeo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hayashi
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015509:Developmental Biology / Q000379:methods*; D004330:Drosophila / Q000196:embryology* / Q000502:physiology*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008164:Luminescent Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D018613:Microscopy, Confocal / Q000379:methods*; D010641:Phenotype; D012984:Software; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D008164:Luminescent Proteins