Segmentation and Tracking of Adherens Junctions in 3D for the Analysis of Epithelial Tissue Morphogenesis
Fig 1
The developed system for the preprocessing, segmentation and tracking of epithelial cells.
A) Schematic of the computational pipeline from the acquisition of 3D time lapse data to image preprocessing, cell segmentation and tracking. After segmenting the cells, we define symbolically their structure using a planar graph connecting detected AJ vertices with edges (green). Then we identify the cells in the tissue as the faces of the AJ graph and build the Cell graph to describe cell connectivity (blue). Finally, we establish correspondence between cells among frames (colored lines connecting cell centroids) obtaining cell trajectories. (B-G) Part of an epithelium of a Drosophila leg at early pupal stages. This tissue dramatically narrows and elongates at this stage to generate a narrow and hollow cylinder while the epithelium at presumptive joints invaginates. B) Maximum intensity projection of an image stack through the leg epithelium marked with E-cad∷GFP to highlight cell outlines. Distal up, narrow region—presumptive joint; wider regions part of the presumptive segment. C) Projection of the denoised and deconvoluted volume. D) The output of the filters employed to detect AJs (green) and AJ vertices (red). E) AJ graph representing the AJs structure. F) Cell graph representing neighborhood relationships among cells in the tissue. G) Polygonal representation of the cells, colored according to assigned temporal identifiers.