IA-Lab: A MATLAB framework for efficient microscopy image analysis development, applied to quantifying intracellular transport of internalized peptide-drug conjugate.

Adam M Corrigan,Yinhai Wang,Jan Wildenhain,Maria Karlsson,Laurent Knerr,Svenja Lünse,Maria Ölwegård-Halvarsson,Johan Karlsson,Vadim E Degtyar

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0220627

Adam M Corrigan, Yinhai Wang + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220627

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Abstract

This work presents a MATLAB-based software package for high-throughput microscopy image analysis development, making such development more accessible for a large user community. The toolbox provides a GUI and a number of analysis workflows, and can serve as a general framework designed to allow for easy extension. For a new application, only a minor part of the object-oriented code needs to be replaced by new components, making development efficient. This makes it possible to quickly develop solutions for analysis not available in existing tools. We show its use in making a tool for quantifying intracellular transport of internalized peptide-drug conjugates.The code is freely available as open source on GitHub (https://github.com/amcorrigan/ia-lab)

Highlights

High-throughput microscopy image analysis is an area of increasing importance for biomedical research in academia and the pharmaceutical industry, with experiments and subsequent image analytics becoming ever more complex
The new module was used in a workflow together with existing modules, as seen in Fig 1, to quantify intracellular aggregation patterns of four different Peptide-drug conjugates (PDCs) formulations: Alexa-488 labeled human transferrin (488-Tf, T13342 Invitrogen), a glucagon-like protein-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist labeled at the C terminus with BODIPY FL, a stable peptide-small molecule conjugate of the same GLP1 receptor agonist and Bodipy FL labeled small molecule cargo, a cleavable peptide-small molecule conjugate of the same GLP1 receptor agonist and a BODIPY FL labeled small molecule cargo
The tool including source code is freely available under the LGPLv3 Open source license on GitHub

Summary

Introduction

High-throughput microscopy image analysis is an area of increasing importance for biomedical research in academia and the pharmaceutical industry, with experiments and subsequent image analytics becoming ever more complex. Peptide-drug conjugates (PDCs) represent an important class of therapeutic agents in the context of targeted drug delivery and new therapeutic modalities [1, 2], and several approaches using synthetic ligands have recently entered the clinic. PDCs aim to improve the treatment efficacy of a drug through targeted delivery and release in specific cells or tissues [3, 4]. This is achieved by combining one or more drug molecules with a potent and selective homing peptide designed to target specific surface receptors, that potentially allow internalization of the conjugate, through structural compatibility of the peptide [5, 6].

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