Section: New Results

Estimation of the reference point giving the most uniform angular distribution

Participants : Thierry Pécot, Patrick Bouthemy, Charles Kervrann.

Rab11 proteins are trafficking from the Endosomal Recycling Compartment (ERC) to locations in the cell membrane where they eventually fuse. In this study, we assume that the Rab11 positive membranes are uniformly distributed around the ERC at the cell membrane. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the angular distribution of Rab11 positive membranes from several image sequences acquired with a TIRF microscope at the cell membrane level by considering all the points located in the cell as a reference point. We then compute the entropy of angular distribution for each point and estimate the ERC location as the reference point that gives the maximum entropy for the angular distribution (see Fig. 4 ). These results are very close to the ERC locations manually annotated by experts.

Collaborators: Jean Salamero (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie, PICT-IBiSA),

                          Jérôme Boulanger (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie),

                          Liu Zengzhen (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie).