Caenorhabditis elegans Egg-Laying Detection and Behavior Study Using Image Analysis
- PDF / 2,133,876 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 600 x 792 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 209 Views
Caenorhabditis elegans Egg-Laying Detection and Behavior Study Using Image Analysis Wei Geng Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, USA Email: wei [email protected]
Pamela Cosman Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, USA Email: [email protected]
Megan Palm Division of Biological Sciences, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0349, USA Email: [email protected]
William R. Schafer Division of Biological Sciences, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0349, USA Email: [email protected] Received 15 January 2004; Revised 26 July 2004 Egg laying is an important phase of the life cycle of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Previous studies examined egg-laying events manually. This paper presents a method for automatic detection of egg-laying onset using deformable template matching and other morphological image analysis techniques. Some behavioral changes surrounding egg-laying events are also studied. The results demonstrate that the computer vision tools and the algorithm developed here can be effectively used to study C. elegans egg-laying behaviors. The algorithm developed is an essential part of a machine-vision system for C. elegans tracking and behavioral analysis. Keywords and phrases: egg-laying, C. elegans, behaviors, image analysis, deformable template matching, computer vision.
1.
INTRODUCTION
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is widely used for genetic studies of development, cell biology, and gene regulation. In particular, because of its facile genetics, well-described nervous system, and complete genome sequence, it is particularly well suited to analysis of the molecular and cellular basis of nervous system function and development. The ability to functionally map the influence of particular genes to specific behavioral phenotypes makes it possible to use genetic analysis to functionally dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying poorly understood aspects of nervous system function such as addiction, learning, and This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
sensory perception. However, many genes with critical roles in neuronal function have effects on behavior that are difficult to describe precisely, or occur over time scales too long to be compatible with real-time scoring by a human observer. Therefore, to fully realize the potential of C. elegans for the genetic analysis of the nervous system function, it is necessary to develop sophisticated methods for the rapid and consistent quantitation of mutant phenotypes, especially those related to behavior. One of the most important behaviors for the analysis of neuronal signal transduction mechanisms is egg laying. Egg laying in C. elegans occurs when embryos are expell
Data Loading...
