Development of detection and tracking methods for characterizing Cardiac Progenitor Cell migration patterns in Gallus gallus

Reynolds, Connor (2022) Development of detection and tracking methods for characterizing Cardiac Progenitor Cell migration patterns in Gallus gallus. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

Preview

PDF Download (4MB) | Preview

Abstract

Cardiac cells originate from a population of progenitors which establish the early heart tube following a long-range migration event that initiates during gastrulation. After exiting the mid-anterior primitive streak, the trajectories of cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) up to the fusion of the primitive heart tube have been previously characterised. Associating the function of signalling molecules with these migration patterns and the subsequent outcome on heart development is still poorly understood. The popular and versatile software TrackMate has previously been used to track fluorescently labelled cells in embryos across time-lapsed images, but the tool has not been evaluated in the context of CPC migration in chick embryos. Here, we identified shortcomings in TrackMate’s cell detection and single-cell-tracking methods in general, so instead developed a tracking method based on kernel density estimates of generalized groups of cells. After training and evaluating our approach using simulated migration datasets, we applied the method on true CPC time-lapses to determine a significantly more obtuse initial exit angle in CPCs treated with follistatin compared to controls. We further provided a proof-of-concept machine learning-based workflow for automatically comparing CPC migration time-lapses when current datasets are expanded.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	27 Mar 2023 10:30
Last Modified:	27 Mar 2023 10:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/91687
DOI:

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item