2 posts tagged with "Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology"

A graduate student was doing a project that necessitated identification of individual cells and their nuclei in microscope fluorescence images and quantification of image characteristics within the cell/nuclei areas. With hundreds of cells per image, tens to hundreds of image layers per 3D exposure, and many exposures for the entire experiment, the process of manually tracing each cell and nucleus area in each image using the ImageJ analysis software was incredibly time consuming. Our group worked closely with the lab to develop a program that would automatically identify, outline, and number the cell and nucleus areas, as well as perform the desired analysis, saving the lab countless hours of work.

The principal investigator (PI) wanted to be able to surround a mouse with a 4-walled display of synchronized striped patterns for behavioral experiments, and to sync the history of these displays with her neural and video recording system. The Research Software Programming team developed a MATLAB program to display the desired patterns on a set of four computer monitors arranged as a box, controlled by a fifth monitor, with additional signals wired from the computer to the recording system to track the timing and types of patterns displayed.