Mohler, William A. et al. (2011) International Worm Meeting "The GLOWorm repository"

Moraru, Ion, Mohler, William A., Duzy, Glenn, Isaacson, Ariel B., Morgan, Frank, Vasilescu, Dan, Dutton, Jeffrey

[International Worm Meeting, 2011]

All wild-type C. elegans embryos re-enact the same series of cell divisions, deaths, movements and fates within a nearly identical space and time-scale. 4-dimensional recordings of embryos expressing single fluorescent transgenes are, therefore, conceptually superimposable for synchronized comparison and correlation. Technical hurdles that prevent such comparisons from being more commonly useful include diverse image data types, the sheer size of the data, and the likelihood that any single embryo might vary slightly in its spatial dimensions, its rate of development, or stochastic quirks in its cells' positioning and movements. Our system allows anyone in the community to access the contents of multi-gigabyte data sets via a web-facilitated file-sharing interface, downloading only those fragments of 4D movies that are of particular interest to each viewer. Visualized scenes can combine an arbitrary collection of different genotypes presented in synchrony, with interactive controls for fitting each to a common spatiotemporal frame. A variety of public-domain algorithms packaged within the GLOWormJ adaptation of ImageJ permit enhancements, measurements, and annotation of features within each embryo. The saved adjustments and markings for any embryo in the collection can be recalled along with those of other embryos to foster progressively better comparisons and richer insights.