Quantitative Assessment of Eye Phenotypes for Functional Genetic Studies Using Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: About two-thirds of the vital genes in the Drosophila genome are involved in eye development, making the fly eye an excellent genetic system to study cellular function and development, neurodevelopment/degeneration, and complex diseases such as cancer and diabetes. We developed a novel computational method, implemented as Flynotyper software (http://flynotyper.sourceforge.net), to quantitatively assess the morphological defects in the Drosophila eye resulting from genetic alterations affecting basic cellular and developmental processes. Flynotyper utilizes a series of image processing operations to automatically detect the fly eye and the individual ommatidium, and calculates a phenotypic score as a measure of the disorderliness of ommatidial arrangement in the fly eye. As a proof of princ

SUBMITTER: Iyer J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4856093 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature