RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 MTQuant: “Seeing” Beyond the Diffraction Limit in Fluorescence Images to Quantify Neuronal Microtubule Organization
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 074047
DO 10.1101/074047
A1 Roshni Cooper
A1 Shaul Yogev
A1 Kang Shen
A1 Mark Horowitz
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/08/074047.abstract
AB Motivation: Microtubules (MTs) are polarized polymers that are critical for cell structure and axonal transport. They form a bundle in neurons, but beyond that, their organization is relatively unstudied.Results: We present MTQuant, a method for quantifying MT organization using light microscopy, which distills three parameters from MT images: the spacing of MT minus-ends, their average length, and the average number of MTs in a cross-section of the bundle. This method allows for robust and rapid in vivo analysis of MTs, rendering it more practical and more widely applicable than commonly-used electron microscopy reconstructions. MTQuant was successfully validated with three ground truth data sets and applied to over 3000 images of MTs in a C. elegans motor neuron.Availability: MATLAB code is available at http://roscoope.github.io/MTQuantContact: horowitz{at}stanford.eduSupplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.