Section: New Results

Detection of cytoneme

Participants : Christelle Requena, Xavier Descombes.

This work is made in collaboration with Pascal Thérond, Tamas Matusek and Caterina Novelli (iBV). It is supported by the ANR project HMOVE.

Cellular communication is one of the most important processes for understanding and controlling morphogenesis (the set of laws that determine the structure of tissues and organs during embryonic development) necessary for the development of an organism. This is an important issue in the field of developmental biology and it has recently been shown that the exchange of information between cells is controlled by long cellular extensions called "cytonemes".

Due to the amount of information to be processed and the time required to study this information, it is essential to be able to provide image processing tools through which reliable, automatic and effective methods are proposed for these studies. In this work we have developped a pipeline for membrane extension and vesicles detection from in vivo data obtained by confocal microscopy. The vesicles are detected using a marked point process modeling. The cell extension detection embed the membrane detection using active contours and the filament detection using a tophat operator, the Frangi filter and Dijkstra algorithm. With this detection tool (exemplified in Figure 3), we have characterized a mutant population compared to a wild population of drosophila wings with respect to Hedgehog signalization. Interestingly we have shown that a significative difference appears in the cytonemes length but not in their number.

Figure 3. Cytoneme (green filaments) and Hedgehog vesicles detection (white circles).