Understanding the development of complex multicellular organisms as a function of the underlying cell behavior is one of the most fundamental goals of developmental biology. The ability to quantitatively follow cell dynamics in entire developing embryos is an indispensable step towards such a system-level understanding. In recent years, light-sheet fluorescence microscopy has emerged as a particularly promising strategy for recording the in vivo data required to realize this goal. Using light-sheet fluorescence microscopy, entire complex organisms can be rapidly imaged in three dimensions at sub-cellular resolution, achieving high temporal sampling and excellent signal-to-noise ratio without damaging the living specimen or bleaching fluorescent markers. The resulting datasets allow following individual cells in vertebrate and higher invertebrate embryos over up to several days of development. However, the complexity and size of these multi-terabyte recordings typically preclude comprehensive manual analyses. Thus, new computational approaches are required to automatically segment cell morphologies, accurately track cell identities and systematically analyze cell behavior throughout embryonic development. We review current efforts in light-sheet microscopy and bioimage informatics towards this goal, and argue that comprehensive cell lineage reconstructions are finally within reach for many key model organisms, including fruit fly, zebrafish and mouse.

Cell lineage defines the mitotic connection between cells that make up an organism. Mapping these connections in relation to cell identity offers an extraordinary insight into the mechanisms underlying normal and pathological development. The analysis of molecular determinants involved in the acquisition of cell identity requires gaining experimental access to precise parts of cell lineages. Recently, we have developed CaSSA and CLADES, a new technology based on CRISPR that allows targeting and labeling specific lineage branches. Here we discuss how to better exploit this technology for lineage studies in Drosophila, with an emphasis on neuronal specification.

Tracking all nuclei of an embryo in noisy and dense fluorescence microscopy data is a challenging task. We build upon a recent method for nuclei tracking that combines weakly-supervised learning from a small set of nuclei center point annotations with an integer linear program (ILP) for optimal cell lineage extraction. Our work specifically addresses the following challenging properties of C. elegans embryo recordings: (1) Many cell divisions as compared to benchmark recordings of other organisms, and (2) the presence of polar bodies that are easily mistaken as cell nuclei. To cope with (1), we devise and incorporate a learnt cell division detector. To cope with (2), we employ a learnt polar body detector. We further propose automated ILP weights tuning via a structured SVM, alleviating the need for tedious manual set-up of a respective grid search.

Summary HYlight is a genetically encoded fluorescent biosensor that ratiometrically monitors fructose 1,6-bisphosphate (FBP), a key glycolytic metabolite. Given the role of glucose in liver cancer metabolism, we expressed HYlight in human liver cancer cells and primary mouse hepatocytes. Through in vitro, in silico, and in cellulo experiments, we showed HYlight’s ability to monitor FBP changes linked to glycolysis, not gluconeogenesis. HYlight’s affinity for FBP was ∼1 μM and stable within physiological pH range. HYlight demonstrated weak binding to dihydroxyacetone phosphate, and its ratiometric response was influenced by both ionic strength and phosphate. Therefore, simulating cytosolic conditions in vitro was necessary to establish a reliable correlation between HYlight’s cellular responses and FBP concentrations. FBP concentrations were found to be in the lower micromolar range, far lower than previous millimolar estimates. Altogether, this biosensor approach offers real-time monitoring of FBP concentrations at single-cell resolution, making it an invaluable tool for the understanding of cancer metabolism.

We present a particle filtering algorithm for robustly tracking the contours of multiple deformable objects through severe occlusions. Our algorithm combines a multiple blob tracker with a contour tracker in a manner that keeps the required number of samples small. This is a natural combination because both algorithms have complementary strengths. The multiple blob tracker uses a natural multi-target model and searches a smaller and simpler space. On the other hand, contour tracking gives more fine-tuned results and relies on cues that are available during severe occlusions. Our choice of combination of these two algorithms accentuates the advantages of each. We demonstrate good performance on challenging video of three identical mice that contains multiple instances of severe occlusion.

We are interested in establishing the correspondence between neuron activity and body curvature during various movements of C. Elegans worms. Given long sequences of images, specifically recorded to glow when the neuron is active, it is required to track all identifiable neurons in each frame. The characteristics of the neuron data, e.g., the uninformative nature of neuron appearance and the sequential ordering of neurons, renders standard single and multi-object tracking methods either ineffective or unnecessary for our task. In this paper, we propose a multi-target tracking algorithm that correctly assigns each neuron to one of several candidate locations in the next frame preserving shape constraint. The results demonstrate how the proposed method can robustly track more neurons than several existing methods in long sequences of images.