Spherical harmonics analysis reveals cell shape-fate relationships in zebrafish lateral line neuromasts.

ABSTRACT: Cell shape is a powerful readout of cell state, fate and function. We describe a custom workflow to perform semi-automated, 3D cell and nucleus segmentation, and spherical harmonics and principal components analysis to distill cell and nuclear shape variation into discrete biologically meaningful parameters. We apply these methods to analyze shape in the neuromast cells of the zebrafish lateral line system, finding that shapes vary with cell location and identity. The distinction between hair cells and support cells accounted for much of the variation, which allowed us to train classifiers to predict cell identity from shape features. Using transgenic markers for support cell subpopulations, we found that subtypes had different shapes from each other. To investigate how loss of a neuromast

SUBMITTER: Hewitt MN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10905750 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature