Tutorial 1: Computational Modeling of the Dividing Human Cell

Cell division/mitosis is a fundamental process of life where a mother cell undergoes profound morphological transformations to divide into two daughter cells. This process is driven by tight coordination of a large number of essential proteins in space and time. Recent publication from our group (Cai Y. and Hossain MJ et al., Nature 2018) utilized four-dimensional (3D+time) image data to construct a canonical model of the morphological change of human cells during the cell division in order to quantify spatio-temporal dynamics of essential mitotic proteins. We also constructed a dynamic protein atlas containing 28 mitotic proteins where user can visualize distributions of mitotic proteins during cell division within the cell model and obtain various parameters such absolute number proteins and average concentration inside different cellular compartments. During this tutorial, I will first introduce the project and the computation framework briefly. Then with a simpler version of source code, mostly developed in MATLAB, I will demonstrate various steps needed such as segmentation, parameters extraction, registration, cylindrical axis based representation and averaging in order to construct a canonical model of mitosis using a small set of data. The model is used to integrate proteins of interest from different cells to obtain average distributions. I will also demonstrate the functionality of the protein atlas.