Deep phenotyping unveils hidden traits and genetic relations in subtle mutants.

ABSTRACT: Discovering mechanistic insights from phenotypic information is critical for the understanding of biological processes. For model organisms, unlike in cell culture, this is currently bottlenecked by the non-quantitative nature and perceptive biases of human observations, and the limited number of reporters that can be simultaneously incorporated in live animals. An additional challenge is that isogenic populations exhibit significant phenotypic heterogeneity. These difficulties limit genetic approaches to many biological questions. To overcome these bottlenecks, we developed tools to extract complex phenotypic traits from images of fluorescently labelled subcellular landmarks, using C. elegans synapses as a test case. By population-wide comparisons, we identified subtle but relevant differ

SUBMITTER: San-Miguel A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5122966 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature