Please read Dr. Posfai’s article in Development titled, “Nuclear instance segmentation and tracking for preimplantation mouse embryos.“
During preimplantation development of the mouse embryo, two consecutive cell fate decisions set aside precursors of extra-embryonic tissues from cells which will form the body of the embryo. Live images of embryos expressing fluorescently tagged proteins are particularly useful for learning the rules by which cells in the embryo dynamically interact with each other to specify these fates. However, deriving mechanistic insights from these images depends on extraction of quantitative information about cellular features, such as the position of each cell or the expression levels of specific proteins within each cell. Accurate segmentation of nuclei is a first step towards such a goal, as a cell nucleus is a good proxy for cell position relative to its neighbors and can contain information about cell-fate-specifying protein expression. To quantify these features, the segmentation must not only classify each voxel as foreground or background but also assign each ‘instance’ (i.e. nucleus) with a distinct label. To read the full article.
Nuclear instance segmentation and tracking for preimplantation mouse embryos. Nunley H, Shao B, Denberg D, Grover P, Singh J, Avdeeva M, Joyce B, Kim-Yip R, Kohrman A, Biswas A, Watters A, Gal Z, Kickuth A, Chalifoux M, Shvartsman SY, Brown LM, Posfai E. 2024 Nov 1;151(21):dev202817. PMID: 39373366 PMCID: PMC11574361 DOI: 10.1242/dev.202817