Quantifying Cell Viability in Cultured Cells

Jiyun Byun*1,2, DeeAnn Hartung*3,4, Stuart Feinstein3,4, and B. S. Manjunath1,2
1 Center for Bio-image Informatics,
2 Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
3 Neuroscience Research Institute,
4 Dept of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental
Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. http://www.bioimage.ucsb.edu

Abstract

Analyzing cell viability is crucial in understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms of disease. With more than 20 million cases worldwide, Alzheimer's disease (AD) is now the most common neurodegenerative disease. There are two pathological hallmarks of the disease, neuritic plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). The extracellular plaques are composed of amyloid-beta (Aβ), an aberrant cleavage product of amyloid precursor protein (APP), and the intracellular NFTs are composed of hyperphosphorylated, aggregated tau protein. Genetic studies have shown that tau action lies downstream of amyloid-beta and is required for amyloid-beta to induce cell death; however, the link between them is unknown (Figure 1). We present a novel method to segment complex cell clusters from confocal microscopy images of COS1 cells. The proposed method provides a reliable alive/dead cell ratio which will test the hypothesis that tau confers an acute hypersensitivity of microtubules to soluble, oligomeric amyloid-beta and that Taxol, a microtubule-stabilizing drug, provides neuroprotective effects.
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Jiyun Byun, DeeAnn Hartung, Stuart Feinstein and B. S. Manjunath,
Workshop on Bio-Image Informatics: Biological Imaging, Computer Vision and Data Mining, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Jan. 2008.
Node ID: 500 , DB ID: 307 , Lab: VRL , Target: Workshop
Subject: [Detection on Images and Videos] « Look up more