Dresden 2020 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 8: Poster I
BP 8.18: Poster
Monday, March 16, 2020, 17:30–19:30, P2/1OG
Trajectories of cell shape and state during cellular fate transitions — •Wolfram Pönisch1,2, Agathe Chaigne1, Irene Aspalter1, Guillaume Salbreux3, and Ewa Paluch1,2 — 1MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology, University College London, London, UK — 2Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK — 3Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
To form complex organisms, cells specialize to perform different tasks, a process called differentiation. The required cellular fate transitions are often accompanied by cell shape changes and there are strong indications that cell shape and state are coupled.
Here, we present a pipeline to quantify and analyze cell shapes during cellular fate changes. We will present how the high-dimensional morphometric features of cell shapes for different cellular states can be quantified and projected to a low-dimensional space with the help of dimensional reduction techniques. To identify clusters of cells and classify cells based on those clusters, we use a variety of machine learning algorithms. We can then study the trajectories of cell shape and cell state markers while cells transition between distinct states.
We use our pipeline to investigate the coupling between cell shape and fate during the exit from naïve pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells. We find that cells can be classified into two unambiguously distinguishable clusters, and investigate the shape and state trajectories of cells, transitioning from a spherical shape towards a spread morphology.