Abstract
Amoeboid cell motility is essential for a wide range of biological processes including wound healing, embryonic morphogenesis, and cancer metastasis. It relies on complex dynamical patterns of cell shape changes that pose long-standing challenges to mathematical modeling and raise a need for automated and reproducible approaches to extract quantitative morphological features from image sequences. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework and a computational method for obtaining smooth representations of the spatiotemporal contour dynamics from stacks of segmented microscopy images. Based on a Gaussian process regression we propose a one-parameter family of regularized contour flows that allows us to continuously track reference points (virtual markers) between successive cell contours. We use this approach to define a coordinate system on the moving cell boundary and to represent different local geometric quantities in this frame of reference. In particular, we introduce the local marker dispersion as a measure to identify localized membrane expansions and provide a fully automated way to extract the properties of such expansions, including their area and growth time. The methods are available as an open-source software package called AmoePy, a Python-based toolbox for analyzing amoeboid cell motility (based on time-lapse microscopy data), including a graphical user interface and detailed documentation. Due to the mathematical rigor of our framework, we envision it to be of use for the development of novel cell motility models. We mainly use experimental data of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum to illustrate and validate our approach.
Highlights
Amoeboid motion is one of the most widespread forms of cell motility in the living world [1]
We obtain a sequence of points, representing the cell membrane, for each time step
Its medical relevance extends to the field of cancer research, as metastatic tumor cells rely on amoeboid motility to invade the surrounding tissue [4]
Summary
Amoeboid motion is one of the most widespread forms of cell motility in the living world [1]. It plays a key role in many essential functions of the human body, such as responses of the immune system [2] or the healing of injured tissue [3]. Together with membrane contraction at the back of the cell body, their extension results in a displacement of the center of mass of the cell This requires, besides the coordinated pattern of protrusion and retraction, the formation and rupture of adhesive contacts to a substrate or to a surrounding extracellular matrix [6]
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