title: Quantitative 4D analyses of epithelial folding during Drosophila gastrulation.
abstract: Understanding the cellular and mechanical processes that underlie the shape changes of individual cells and their collective behaviors in a tissue during dynamic and complex morphogenetic events is currently one of the major frontiers in developmental biology. The advent of high-speed time-lapse microscopy and its use in monitoring the cellular events in fluorescently labeled developing organisms demonstrate tremendous promise in establishing detailed descriptions of these events and could potentially provide a foundation for subsequent hypothesis-driven research strategies. However, obtaining quantitative measurements of dynamic shapes and behaviors of cells and tissues in a rapidly developing metazoan embryo using time-lapse 3D microscopy remains technically challenging, with the main hurdle being the shortage of robust imaging processing and analysis tools. We have developed EDGE4D, a software tool for segmenting and tracking membrane-labeled cells using multi-photon microscopy data. Our results demonstrate that EDGE4D enables quantification of the dynamics of cell shape changes, cell interfaces and neighbor relations at single-cell resolution during a complex epithelial folding event in the early Drosophila embryo. We expect this tool to be broadly useful for the analysis of epithelial cell geometries and movements in a wide variety of developmental contexts.
authors.affiliation: Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA zia@cs.umd.edu kaschube@fias.uni-frankfurt.de.
authors.forename: Zia
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, 2-2-3 Minatojima-minamimachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi, Hyogo-ken 650-0047, Japan Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Moffett Laboratory 435, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Yu-Chiun
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Moffett Laboratory 435, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Eric F
authors.initials: EF
authors.lastname: Wieschaus
authors.affiliation: Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main D-60438, Germany zia@cs.umd.edu kaschube@fias.uni-frankfurt.de.
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kaschube
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019521:Body Patterning; D048430:Cell Shape; D058948:Cell Tracking; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000166:cytology / Q000196:embryology*; D004847:Epithelial Cells / Q000166:cytology / Q000378:metabolism; D004848:Epithelium / Q000196:embryology*; D054262:Gastrulation; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D012984:Software
keywords: Cell shape analysis; Cell shape reconstruction; Cell tracking; Drosophila melanogaster; Epithelial folding; Live imaging