Abstract
The systematic study of single-cell migration requires the availability of software for assisting data inspection, quality control and analysis. This is especially important for high-throughput experiments, where multiple biological conditions are tested in parallel. Although the field of cell migration can count on different computational tools for cell segmentation and tracking, downstream data visualization, parameter extraction and statistical analysis are still left to the user and are currently not possible within a single tool. This article presents a completely new module for the open-source, cross-platform CellMissy software for cell migration data management. This module is the first tool to focus specifically on single-cell migration data downstream of image processing. It allows fast comparison across all tested conditions, providing automated data visualization, assisted data filtering and quality control, extraction of various commonly used cell migration parameters, and non-parametric statistical analysis. Importantly, the module enables parameters computation both at the trajectory- and at the step-level. Moreover, this single-cell analysis module is complemented by a new data import module that accommodates multiwell plate data obtained from high-throughput experiments, and is easily extensible through a plugin architecture. In conclusion, the end-to-end software solution presented here tackles a key bioinformatics challenge in the cell migration field, assisting researchers in their high-throughput data processing.
Highlights
Multiscale Visualization Multiparameter annotation Free Source tracking technical replicates control Statistics Database analysis of tracks visualization
Despite this table not being comprehensive, it clearly indicates that the field is still lacking a user-friendly, freely-available and open-source software that provides an end-to-end solution for automated management, processing and inspection of the data generated by the tracking software. Such a tool needs to allow for quality control, cell migration parameter extraction, and statistical comparison of different conditions
The absence of an open solution for automated data management, inspection, quality control, and analysis constitutes the major bottleneck in the processing of high-throughput single-cell migration experiments today, because this process remains very labor-intensive
Summary
Multiscale Visualization Multiparameter annotation Free Source tracking technical replicates control Statistics Database analysis of tracks visualization. Despite this table not being comprehensive, it clearly indicates that the field is still lacking a user-friendly, freely-available and open-source software that provides an end-to-end solution for automated management, processing and inspection of the data generated by the tracking software. Cell speed and persistence of motion for instance, are only calculated at the cell population level, averaging those parameters across a collection of recorded cells, de facto losing a lot of potentially interesting information To fill this gap, we here present an open-source solution, implemented as new module in CellMissy, for the automated quality control, inspection, and analysis of single-cell migration experiments
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