Gabor Kiss, S. Moutari, Cara Mctaggart, Lynsey Patterson, Frank Kee, Felicity Lamrock
This study introduces a deterministic formulation for modelling the asymptotic spread of a vaccine preventable disease as well as the different stages for the progression of the disease. We derive the formula for the associated basic reproduction number. To illustrate the proposed model, we use data from the 2017–2018 diphtheria outbreak in Yemen and fit the parameters of the model. A sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number, with respect to the model parameters, show that this number increases with an increase of the transmission rate while this number decreases when vaccination rate increases.
{"title":"Deterministic modelling of asymptomatic spread and disease stage progression in vaccine preventable infectious diseases","authors":"Gabor Kiss, S. Moutari, Cara Mctaggart, Lynsey Patterson, Frank Kee, Felicity Lamrock","doi":"10.1002/qub2.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.50","url":null,"abstract":"This study introduces a deterministic formulation for modelling the asymptotic spread of a vaccine preventable disease as well as the different stages for the progression of the disease. We derive the formula for the associated basic reproduction number. To illustrate the proposed model, we use data from the 2017–2018 diphtheria outbreak in Yemen and fit the parameters of the model. A sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number, with respect to the model parameters, show that this number increases with an increase of the transmission rate while this number decreases when vaccination rate increases.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"54 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141650613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Transfer learning has revolutionized fields including natural language understanding and computer vision by leveraging large‐scale general datasets to pretrain models with foundational knowledge that can then be transferred to improve predictions in a vast range of downstream tasks. More recently, there has been a growth in the adoption of transfer learning approaches in biological fields, where models have been pretrained on massive amounts of biological data and employed to make predictions in a broad range of biological applications. However, unlike in natural language where humans are best suited to evaluate models given a clear understanding of the ground truth, biology presents the unique challenge of being in a setting where there are a plethora of unknowns while at the same time needing to abide by real‐world physical constraints. This perspective provides a discussion of some key points we should consider as a field in designing benchmarks for foundation models in network biology.
{"title":"Perspectives on benchmarking foundation models for network biology","authors":"Christina V. Theodoris","doi":"10.1002/qub2.68","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.68","url":null,"abstract":"Transfer learning has revolutionized fields including natural language understanding and computer vision by leveraging large‐scale general datasets to pretrain models with foundational knowledge that can then be transferred to improve predictions in a vast range of downstream tasks. More recently, there has been a growth in the adoption of transfer learning approaches in biological fields, where models have been pretrained on massive amounts of biological data and employed to make predictions in a broad range of biological applications. However, unlike in natural language where humans are best suited to evaluate models given a clear understanding of the ground truth, biology presents the unique challenge of being in a setting where there are a plethora of unknowns while at the same time needing to abide by real‐world physical constraints. This perspective provides a discussion of some key points we should consider as a field in designing benchmarks for foundation models in network biology.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"89 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141657759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Razieh Rezaei Adriani, S. M. Mousavi Gargari, Hamid Bakherad, J. Amani
Monoclonal antibodies are attractive therapeutic agents in a wide range of human disorders that bind specifically to their target through their complementary‐determining regions (CDRs). Small proteins with structurally preserved CDRs are promising antibodies mimetics. In this in silico study, we presented new antibody mimetics against the cancer marker epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) created by the CDRs grafting technique. Ten potential graft acceptor sites that efficiently immobilize the grafted CDR loops were selected from three small protein scaffolds using a computer. The three most involved CDR loops in antibody‐receptor interactions extracted from panitumumab antibody against the EGFR domain III crystal structure were then grafted to the selected scaffolds through the loop randomization technique. The combination of three CDR loops and 10 grafting sites revealed that three of the 36 combinations showed specific binding to EGFR DIII by binding energy calculations. Thus, the present strategy and selected small protein scaffolds are promising tools in the design of new binders against EGFR with high binding energy.
{"title":"In silico designing and optimization of anti‐epidermal growth factor receptor scaffolds by complementary‐determining regions‐grafting technique","authors":"Razieh Rezaei Adriani, S. M. Mousavi Gargari, Hamid Bakherad, J. Amani","doi":"10.1002/qub2.63","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.63","url":null,"abstract":"Monoclonal antibodies are attractive therapeutic agents in a wide range of human disorders that bind specifically to their target through their complementary‐determining regions (CDRs). Small proteins with structurally preserved CDRs are promising antibodies mimetics. In this in silico study, we presented new antibody mimetics against the cancer marker epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) created by the CDRs grafting technique. Ten potential graft acceptor sites that efficiently immobilize the grafted CDR loops were selected from three small protein scaffolds using a computer. The three most involved CDR loops in antibody‐receptor interactions extracted from panitumumab antibody against the EGFR domain III crystal structure were then grafted to the selected scaffolds through the loop randomization technique. The combination of three CDR loops and 10 grafting sites revealed that three of the 36 combinations showed specific binding to EGFR DIII by binding energy calculations. Thus, the present strategy and selected small protein scaffolds are promising tools in the design of new binders against EGFR with high binding energy.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"4 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141659272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Epithelial cell networks imply a packing geometry characterized by various cell shapes and distributions in terms of number of cell neighbors and areas. Despite such simple characteristics describing cell sheets, the formation of bubble‐like cells during the morphogenesis of epithelial tissues remains poorly understood. This study proposes a topological mathematical model of morphogenesis in a squamous epithelial. We introduce a new potential that takes into account not only the elasticity of cell perimeter and area but also the elasticity of their internal angles. Additionally, we incorporate an integral equation for chemical signaling, allowing us to consider chemo‐mechanical cell interactions. In addition to the listed factors, the model takes into account essential processes in real epithelial, such as cell proliferation and intercalation. The presented mathematical model has yielded novel insights into the packing of epithelial sheets. It has been found that there are two main states: one consists of cells of the same size, and the other consists of “bubble” cells. An example is provided of the possibility of accounting for chemo‐mechanical interactions in a multicellular environment. The introduction of a parameter determining the flexibility of cell shapes enables the modeling of more complex cell behaviors, such as considering change of cell phenotype. The developed mathematical model of morphogenesis of squamous epithelium allows progress in understanding the processes of formation of cell networks. The results obtained from mathematical modeling are of significant importance for understanding the mechanisms of morphogenesis and development of epithelial tissues. Additionally, the obtained results can be applied in developing methods to influence morphogenetic processes in medical applications.
{"title":"Mathematical modeling of evolution of cell networks in epithelial tissues","authors":"I. Krasnyakov","doi":"10.1002/qub2.62","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.62","url":null,"abstract":"Epithelial cell networks imply a packing geometry characterized by various cell shapes and distributions in terms of number of cell neighbors and areas. Despite such simple characteristics describing cell sheets, the formation of bubble‐like cells during the morphogenesis of epithelial tissues remains poorly understood. This study proposes a topological mathematical model of morphogenesis in a squamous epithelial. We introduce a new potential that takes into account not only the elasticity of cell perimeter and area but also the elasticity of their internal angles. Additionally, we incorporate an integral equation for chemical signaling, allowing us to consider chemo‐mechanical cell interactions. In addition to the listed factors, the model takes into account essential processes in real epithelial, such as cell proliferation and intercalation. The presented mathematical model has yielded novel insights into the packing of epithelial sheets. It has been found that there are two main states: one consists of cells of the same size, and the other consists of “bubble” cells. An example is provided of the possibility of accounting for chemo‐mechanical interactions in a multicellular environment. The introduction of a parameter determining the flexibility of cell shapes enables the modeling of more complex cell behaviors, such as considering change of cell phenotype. The developed mathematical model of morphogenesis of squamous epithelium allows progress in understanding the processes of formation of cell networks. The results obtained from mathematical modeling are of significant importance for understanding the mechanisms of morphogenesis and development of epithelial tissues. Additionally, the obtained results can be applied in developing methods to influence morphogenetic processes in medical applications.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":" 83","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141670549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Copy number variation (CNV) refers to the number of copies of a specific sequence in a genome and is a type of chromatin structural variation. The development of the Hi‐C technique has empowered research on the spatial structure of chromatins by capturing interactions between DNA fragments. We utilized machine‐learning methods including the linear transformation model and graph convolutional network (GCN) to detect CNV events from Hi‐C data and reveal how CNV is related to three‐dimensional interactions between genomic fragments in terms of the one‐dimensional read count signal and features of the chromatin structure. The experimental results demonstrated a specific linear relation between the Hi‐C read count and CNV for each chromosome that can be well qualified by the linear transformation model. In addition, the GCN‐based model could accurately extract features of the spatial structure from Hi‐C data and infer the corresponding CNV across different chromosomes in a cancer cell line. We performed a series of experiments including dimension reduction, transfer learning, and Hi‐C data perturbation to comprehensively evaluate the utility and robustness of the GCN‐based model. This work can provide a benchmark for using machine learning to infer CNV from Hi‐C data and serves as a necessary foundation for deeper understanding of the relationship between Hi‐C data and CNV.
{"title":"Effectiveness of machine learning at modeling the relationship between Hi‐C data and copy number variation","authors":"Yuyang Wang, Yu Sun, Zeyu Liu, Bijia Chen, Hebing Chen, Chao Ren, Xuanwei Lin, Pengzhen Hu, Peiheng Jia, Xiang Xu, Kang Xu, Ximeng Liu, Hao Li, Xiaochen Bo","doi":"10.1002/qub2.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.52","url":null,"abstract":"Copy number variation (CNV) refers to the number of copies of a specific sequence in a genome and is a type of chromatin structural variation. The development of the Hi‐C technique has empowered research on the spatial structure of chromatins by capturing interactions between DNA fragments. We utilized machine‐learning methods including the linear transformation model and graph convolutional network (GCN) to detect CNV events from Hi‐C data and reveal how CNV is related to three‐dimensional interactions between genomic fragments in terms of the one‐dimensional read count signal and features of the chromatin structure. The experimental results demonstrated a specific linear relation between the Hi‐C read count and CNV for each chromosome that can be well qualified by the linear transformation model. In addition, the GCN‐based model could accurately extract features of the spatial structure from Hi‐C data and infer the corresponding CNV across different chromosomes in a cancer cell line. We performed a series of experiments including dimension reduction, transfer learning, and Hi‐C data perturbation to comprehensively evaluate the utility and robustness of the GCN‐based model. This work can provide a benchmark for using machine learning to infer CNV from Hi‐C data and serves as a necessary foundation for deeper understanding of the relationship between Hi‐C data and CNV.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":" 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141671834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Wenlong Zhao, C. Lupala, Shifeng Hou, Shuxin Yang, Ziqi Yan, Shujie Liao, Xuefei Li, Nan Li
{"title":"Assessing the inhibition efficacy of clinical drugs against the main proteases of SARS‐CoV‐2 variants and other coronaviruses","authors":"Wenlong Zhao, C. Lupala, Shifeng Hou, Shuxin Yang, Ziqi Yan, Shujie Liao, Xuefei Li, Nan Li","doi":"10.1002/qub2.60","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.60","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":" 21","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141672447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Identifying drug–drug interactions (DDIs) is an important aspect of drug design research, and predicting DDIs serves as a crucial guarantee for avoiding potential adverse effects. Current substructure‐based prediction methods still have some limitations: (i) The process of substructure extraction does not fully exploit the graph structure information of drugs, as it only evaluates the importance of different radius substructures from a single perspective. (ii) The process of constructing drug representations has overlooked the significant impact of relation embedding on optimizing drug representations. In this work, we propose a substructure‐aware graph neural network incorporating relation features (RFSA‐DDI) for DDI prediction, which introduces a directed message passing neural network with substructure attention mechanism based on graph self‐adaptive pooling (GSP‐DMPNN) and a substructure‐aware interaction module incorporating relation features (RSAM). GSP‐DMPNN utilizes graph self‐adaptive pooling to comprehensively consider node features and local drug information for adaptive extraction of substructures. RSAM interacts drug features with relation representations to enhance their respective features individually, highlighting substructures that significantly impact predictions. RFSA‐DDI is evaluated on two real‐world datasets. Compared to existing methods, RFSA‐DDI demonstrates certain advantages in both transductive and inductive settings, effectively handling the task of predicting DDIs for unseen drugs and exhibiting good generalization capability. The experimental results show that RFSA‐DDI can effectively capture valuable structural information of drugs more accurately for DDI prediction, and provide more reliable assistance for potential DDIs detection in drug development and treatment stages.
{"title":"A substructure‐aware graph neural network incorporating relation features for drug–drug interaction prediction","authors":"Liangcheng Dong, Baoming Feng, Zengqian Deng, Jinlong Wang, Peihao Ni, Yuanyuan Zhang","doi":"10.1002/qub2.66","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.66","url":null,"abstract":"Identifying drug–drug interactions (DDIs) is an important aspect of drug design research, and predicting DDIs serves as a crucial guarantee for avoiding potential adverse effects. Current substructure‐based prediction methods still have some limitations: (i) The process of substructure extraction does not fully exploit the graph structure information of drugs, as it only evaluates the importance of different radius substructures from a single perspective. (ii) The process of constructing drug representations has overlooked the significant impact of relation embedding on optimizing drug representations. In this work, we propose a substructure‐aware graph neural network incorporating relation features (RFSA‐DDI) for DDI prediction, which introduces a directed message passing neural network with substructure attention mechanism based on graph self‐adaptive pooling (GSP‐DMPNN) and a substructure‐aware interaction module incorporating relation features (RSAM). GSP‐DMPNN utilizes graph self‐adaptive pooling to comprehensively consider node features and local drug information for adaptive extraction of substructures. RSAM interacts drug features with relation representations to enhance their respective features individually, highlighting substructures that significantly impact predictions. RFSA‐DDI is evaluated on two real‐world datasets. Compared to existing methods, RFSA‐DDI demonstrates certain advantages in both transductive and inductive settings, effectively handling the task of predicting DDIs for unseen drugs and exhibiting good generalization capability. The experimental results show that RFSA‐DDI can effectively capture valuable structural information of drugs more accurately for DDI prediction, and provide more reliable assistance for potential DDIs detection in drug development and treatment stages.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":" 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141671660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gene regulatory network (GRN) refers to the complex network formed by regulatory interactions between genes in living cells. In this paper, we consider inferring GRNs in single cells based on single‐cell RNA sequencing (scRNA‐seq) data. In scRNA‐seq, single cells are often profiled from mixed populations, and their cell identities are unknown. A common practice for single‐cell GRN analysis is to first cluster the cells and infer GRNs for every cluster separately. However, this two‐step procedure ignores uncertainty in the clustering step and thus could lead to inaccurate estimation of the networks. Here, we consider the mixture Poisson log‐normal model (MPLN) for network inference of count data from mixed populations. The precision matrices of the MPLN are the GRNs of different cell types. To avoid the intractable optimization of the MPLN’s log‐likelihood, we develop an algorithm called variational mixture Poisson log‐normal (VMPLN) to jointly estimate the GRNs of different cell types based on the variational inference method. We compare VMPLN with state‐of‐the‐art single‐cell regulatory network inference methods. Comprehensive simulation shows that VMPLN achieves better performance, especially in scenarios where different cell types have a high mixing degree. Benchmarking on real scRNA‐seq data also demonstrates that VMPLN can provide more accurate network estimation in most cases. Finally, we apply VMPLN to a large scRNA‐seq dataset from patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) and find that VMPLN identifies critical differences in regulatory networks in immune cells between patients with moderate and severe symptoms. The source codes are available on the GitHub website (github.com/XiDsLab/SCVMPLN).
{"title":"Single‐cell gene regulatory network analysis for mixed cell populations","authors":"Junjie Tang, Changhu Wang, Fei Xiao, Ruibin Xi","doi":"10.1002/qub2.64","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.64","url":null,"abstract":"Gene regulatory network (GRN) refers to the complex network formed by regulatory interactions between genes in living cells. In this paper, we consider inferring GRNs in single cells based on single‐cell RNA sequencing (scRNA‐seq) data. In scRNA‐seq, single cells are often profiled from mixed populations, and their cell identities are unknown. A common practice for single‐cell GRN analysis is to first cluster the cells and infer GRNs for every cluster separately. However, this two‐step procedure ignores uncertainty in the clustering step and thus could lead to inaccurate estimation of the networks. Here, we consider the mixture Poisson log‐normal model (MPLN) for network inference of count data from mixed populations. The precision matrices of the MPLN are the GRNs of different cell types. To avoid the intractable optimization of the MPLN’s log‐likelihood, we develop an algorithm called variational mixture Poisson log‐normal (VMPLN) to jointly estimate the GRNs of different cell types based on the variational inference method. We compare VMPLN with state‐of‐the‐art single‐cell regulatory network inference methods. Comprehensive simulation shows that VMPLN achieves better performance, especially in scenarios where different cell types have a high mixing degree. Benchmarking on real scRNA‐seq data also demonstrates that VMPLN can provide more accurate network estimation in most cases. Finally, we apply VMPLN to a large scRNA‐seq dataset from patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) and find that VMPLN identifies critical differences in regulatory networks in immune cells between patients with moderate and severe symptoms. The source codes are available on the GitHub website (github.com/XiDsLab/SCVMPLN).","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"362 21","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141686269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Minsheng Hao, Lei Wei, Fan Yang, Jianhua Yao, Christina V. Theodoris, Bo Wang, Xin Li, Ge Yang, Xuegong Zhang
{"title":"Current opinions on large cellular models","authors":"Minsheng Hao, Lei Wei, Fan Yang, Jianhua Yao, Christina V. Theodoris, Bo Wang, Xin Li, Ge Yang, Xuegong Zhang","doi":"10.1002/qub2.65","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.65","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"11 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141709949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jianfeng Cao, Lihan Hu, Guoye Guan, Zelin Li, Zhongying Zhao, Chao Tang, Hong Yan
Caenorhabditis elegans has been widely used as a model organism in developmental biology due to its invariant development. In this study, we developed a desktop software CShaperApp to segment fluorescence‐labeled images of cell membranes and analyze cellular morphologies interactively during C. elegans embryogenesis. Based on the previously proposed framework CShaper, CShaperApp empowers biologists to automatically and efficiently extract quantitative cellular morphological data with either an existing deep learning model or a fine‐tuned one adapted to their in‐house dataset. Experimental results show that it takes about 30 min to process a three‐dimensional time‐lapse (4D) dataset, which consists of 150 image stacks at a ∼1.5‐min interval and covers C. elegans embryogenesis from the 4‐cell to 350‐cell stages. The robustness of CShaperApp is also validated with the datasets from different laboratories. Furthermore, modularized implementation increases the flexibility in multi‐task applications and promotes its flexibility for future enhancements. As cell morphology over development has emerged as a focus of interest in developmental biology, CShaperApp is anticipated to pave the way for those studies by accelerating the high‐throughput generation of systems‐level quantitative data collection. The software can be freely downloaded from the website of Github (cao13jf/CShaperApp) and is executable on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
{"title":"CShaperApp: Segmenting and analyzing cellular morphologies of the developing Caenorhabditis elegans embryo","authors":"Jianfeng Cao, Lihan Hu, Guoye Guan, Zelin Li, Zhongying Zhao, Chao Tang, Hong Yan","doi":"10.1002/qub2.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.47","url":null,"abstract":"Caenorhabditis elegans has been widely used as a model organism in developmental biology due to its invariant development. In this study, we developed a desktop software CShaperApp to segment fluorescence‐labeled images of cell membranes and analyze cellular morphologies interactively during C. elegans embryogenesis. Based on the previously proposed framework CShaper, CShaperApp empowers biologists to automatically and efficiently extract quantitative cellular morphological data with either an existing deep learning model or a fine‐tuned one adapted to their in‐house dataset. Experimental results show that it takes about 30 min to process a three‐dimensional time‐lapse (4D) dataset, which consists of 150 image stacks at a ∼1.5‐min interval and covers C. elegans embryogenesis from the 4‐cell to 350‐cell stages. The robustness of CShaperApp is also validated with the datasets from different laboratories. Furthermore, modularized implementation increases the flexibility in multi‐task applications and promotes its flexibility for future enhancements. As cell morphology over development has emerged as a focus of interest in developmental biology, CShaperApp is anticipated to pave the way for those studies by accelerating the high‐throughput generation of systems‐level quantitative data collection. The software can be freely downloaded from the website of Github (cao13jf/CShaperApp) and is executable on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.","PeriodicalId":508846,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140967222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}