Expertomica HeLa Cells 3.03 RC

T. Levitner, Š. Timr , I. Khrytankova, D. Štys

Institute of Physical Biology, Zámek 136, Nové Hrady

levitner@greentech.cz

Expertomica Hela Cells (EHC) is a program that creates computer description of the behavior of a cell culture photographed with Time-Lapse microscopy. It is being developed especially for the description of HeLa cells with an experiment range up to 1500 analyzed images with 30-50 cells per image. The EHC can be used for larger experiments or for other cell types as well with minor limitations only.

EHC consists of two logical blocks, the data control block and GUI. However, the user can see only GUI, which he uses to control the whole program. In the program he creates a project into which he loads the directory with analyzed pictures and then enters the position of the cells and their neighbors with a mouse click. The internal cell features, shape in our case, are entered after the cell was highlighted. When the cell divides itself, moves or merges with another cell, a new cell has to be created with a click and its parents and neighbors have to be marked. The whole process goes on this way until a complete computer description is finished.

The topological representation of the complete computer description can be exported into a *.dot file or just a part of it relating to a single cell can be viewed in the Graph panel.

The above mentioned operations are analogous to those performed by biologists decades ago with just one difference. They drew the topological graph by hand on millimeter paper and were able to analyze the culture up to approximately 15 cell cycles. The benefit of the computer description, apart from paper saving and facile storage, is the fact that we can easily compute any parameters of the cell culture (e.g. time between cell division in a single line or within the whole culture), get exact growth speed of the colony, etc.

EHC is written in the Java language version 6 because of its almost unlimited transferability between PC platforms and OS. Another advantage is the small program size.

The following EHC version is to eliminate the above mentioned limitations by adding semi‑automatic analysis and extending program usage to other cell types. After that, the user will solve only disputable analytic cases.

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2. T. Levitner, J. Urban, J. Vaněk, D. Štys, Sledování biologických interakcí z pohledu dostupných dat, Modelování a měření interakcí v mechanice, Nečtiny 2008.

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (MSM 6007665808) and the European Economic Area (EEA) and Norway Grants, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway (A/CZ0046/1/0008).