The automated measurement of foci in fluorecence microscopy

Division Of Basic Sciences - Nci

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Abstract

In collaboration with the laboratory of Dr, Flemming Hansen, Technical University of Denmark, we have developed a fully automated cell recognition and fluorescent focus-measuring program in the form of a macro within the image analysis program Image Pro Plus. This has been very successful in the basic tasks of detecting fluorescent foci formed by plasmids and specific chromosomal loci in cells of the bacterium Escherichia coli. As our needs for analysis of fluorescent images become more demanding, we continue to develop and adapt this system to meet them. We are developing an analytical tool Inspect that facilitates the analysis of images that have two color fluorescence information. In conjunction with the data collection programs, we are developing an array of spreadsheet programs to analyze and portray the data. We have very recently completed a major new thrust in the development of the image analysis software. This allows the automated identification of multiple classes of cells in various states of division, and of foci that are dividing etc. These cells can then be inspected directly as a sub-class of images extracted for inspection. New sub-classes can then be defined and analysed with seamless switching between the numberical data and the individual cell images. This allows us to analyse large populations in far more deteil than was previously possible.