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Isotropic Light-Sheet Microscopy and Automated Cell Lineage Analyses to Catalogue Caenorhabditis elegans Embryogenesis with Subcellular Resolution

Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) stands out as the only organism in which the challenge of understanding the cellular origins of an entire nervous ...

National Institutes of Health

WormGUIDES.org

Imaging and image analysis advances are yielding increasingly complete and complicated records of cellular events in tissues and whole embryos. The ability to follow hundreds to thousands of cells at the individual level demands a spatio-temporal data infrastructure: tools to assemble and collate knowledge about development spatially in a manner analogous to geographic information systems (GIS). Just as GIS indexes items or events based on their spatio-temporal or 4D location on the Earth these tools would organize knowledge based on location within the tissues or embryos. Developmental processes are highly context-specific, but the complexity of the 4D environment in which they unfold is a barrier to assembling an understanding of any particular process from diverse sources of information. In the same way that GIS aids the understanding and use of geo-located large data sets, software can, with a proper frame of reference, allow large biological data sets to be understood spatially. Intuitive tools are needed to navigate the spatial structure of complex tissue, collate large data sets and existing knowledge with this spatial structure and help users derive hypotheses about developmental mechanisms.

WormGUIDES: an interactive single cell developmental atlas and tool for collaborative multidimensional data exploration.

In the version of this Perspective originally published, Fig. 4g included an incorrect inset adapted from a different figure than the main image in the panel. This error has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the paper.

Author Correction: Faster, sharper, and deeper: structured illumination microscopy for biological imaging.

Following fertilization, cortical granules exocytose ovastacin, a metalloendopeptidase that cleaves ZP2 in the zona pellucida surrounding mouse eggs to prevent additional sperm binding. Using high- and super-resolution imaging with ovastacin as a fluorescent marker, we characterize cortical granule dynamics at single granule resolution in transgenic mouse eggs. Newly-developed imaging protocols provide an unprecedented view of vesicular dynamics near the plasma membrane in mouse eggs. We discover that cortical granule anchoring in the cortex is dependent on maternal MATER and document that myosin IIA is required for biphasic trafficking to the plasma membrane. We observe local clearance of cortical actin during exocytosis and determine that pharmacologic or genetic disruption of trafficking to the plasma membrane impairs secretion of cortical granules and results in polyspermy. Thus, the regulation of cortical granule dynamics at the cortex-plasma membrane interface is critical for exocytosis and the post-fertilization block to sperm binding that ensures monospermic fertilization.

Hari Shroff

Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging,
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering,
Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering

National Institutes of Health

Isotropic Light-Sheet Microscopy and Automated Cell Lineage Analyses to Catalogue Caenorhabditis elegans Embryogenesis with Subcellular Resolution

Hari Shroff

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging,National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering,Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering

National Institutes of Health

Isotropic Light-Sheet Microscopy and Automated Cell Lineage Analyses to Catalogue Caenorhabditis elegans Embryogenesis with Subcellular Resolution

Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging,
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering,
Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering