title: WormGender - Open-Source Software for Automatic Caenorhabditis elegans Sex Ratio Measurement.
abstract: Fast and quantitative analysis of animal phenotypes is one of the major challenges of current biology. Here we report the WormGender open-source software, which is designed for accurate quantification of sex ratio in Caenorhabditis elegans. The software functions include, i) automatic recognition and counting of adult hermaphrodites and males, ii) a manual inspection feature that enables manual correction of errors, and iii) flexibility to use new training images to optimize the software for different imaging conditions. We evaluated the performance of our software by comparing manual and automated assessment of sex ratio. Our data showed that the WormGender software provided overall accurate sex ratio measurements. We further demonstrated the usage of WormGender by quantifying the high incidence of male (him) phenotype in 27 mutant strains. Mutants of nine genes (brc-1, C30G12.6, cep-1, coh-3, him-3, him-5, him-8, skr-1, unc-86) showed significant him phenotype. The WormGender is written in Java and can be installed and run on both Windows and Mac platforms. The source code is freely available together with a user manual and sample data at http://www.QuantWorm.org/. The source code and sample data are also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1541248.
authors.affiliation: Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Marta K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Labocha
authors.affiliation: Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Sang-Kyu
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.affiliation: Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Boanerges
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Aleman-Meza
authors.affiliation: Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Zheng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Weiwei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhong
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics; D019295:Computational Biology; D008297:Male; D009154:Mutation; D012744:Sex Ratio; D012984:Software