Marching through the Embryo
1983 Sulston and coworkers published the complete lineage of C. elegans. It took them many years of work to build it up, because they had to analyse the embryo by directly observing the development of a few cells per embryo under the microscope. Although there was now the possibility to analyze an organism on the single cell resolution, there was no way to use the lineage efficiently to study mutants or manipulated embryos.
1989 Minden et al., Hird and White (1993), Thomas (1996) and Schnabel (1997) developed or improved the 4D-microscope a multi focal plane, time lapse video recording system which documents multiple layers of the embryo at constant time intervals and therefore allows the observation of all cells in one embryo.
1997 Schnabel and coworkers and the SIMI company developed a software package for numerous aspects of lineage analysis.
The LINEAGE is the twodimensional projection of the DEVELOPMENT of C. elegans...
1. It facilitates cell tracing and lineage analysis.
2. It builds up an interactive database to store all lineage informations.
3. It allows fast access to data like cell cycle, cell positions and cell fates.
4. It visualizes cell movement.
5. It provides a threedimensional, rotatable representation of the developing and the completely lineaged embryo.
How does SIMI°BioCell work?
What can SIMI¡BioCell do?
1. Lineage analysis is easily done by clicking with the mouse pointer on the cell (nucleus) at any time point in the window displaying the video image. This creates a cross at the position of the cell. In the lineage tree the time point of the now marked cell is indicated by a point on the corresponding branch. Mitosis are created by pressing <return>. In this way the software builds up the lineage tree of your analysed embryo.
2. This lineage tree is displayed on the computer screen together with a reference tree (e.g., that of Sulston et al., 1983) for comparison.
3. The lineage tree serves as database and you can recall every information concerning cells simply by clicking on the points and branches.
4. All these data can be used by tools, e.g. the 3D representation.
Quick online demo
Download Simi BioCell