Cartography of spatio-temporal cellular dynamics

Advanced fluorescence live-cell imaging allows visualising the spatio-temporal dynamics of cellular processes in great detail. A fundamental problem is quantifying such processes in cells that continuously change shape and move. Here I outline recent developments and future challenges in three areas, highlighting the need for a very diverse range of methods to tackle seemingly similar problems: I) A highly efficient and accurate method for cell contour tracking (Electrostatic contour migration method) which outperforms current level set methods, and is used to correlate cytoskeletal dynamics with membrane movement. II) A new interactive method (CellCut) for segmenting and tracking cytoplasm and nuclei of clustered cells, used for quantifying the periodic shuttling of transcription factors between the two compartments. III) LineageTracker, a new statistical scoring based framework for tracking nuclear fluorescence through cell division.