分类: 生物学 >> 生物物理学 >> 生物物理、生物化学与分子生物学 提交时间: 2016-05-05
摘要: Autofocusing is a fundamental step towards automated microscopic screening of Caenorhabditis elegans. Determining the optimal focus in an optical microscope is based on a clarity-evaluation function that is applied to images acquired from different focuses of the same field. The maximum value of the function is considered as the point of optimal focus. In this paper, 16 autofocus algorithms which were collected from well-known algorithms as well as the most recently proposed focusing algorithms have been evaluated. Through these evaluations, an optimal algorithm was found for C. elegants lipid droplets to set up an automatic screening system. Many features were assessed in this paper, for instance accuracy, computational time, addition of noise, and focusing curve. Our results have shown that most of the algorithms show an overall high performance for this type of image, and absolute Tenengrad algorithm will be our first choice for its best performance considering accuracy.
分类: 生物学 >> 生物物理学 >> 生物物理、生物化学与分子生物学 提交时间: 2016-05-12
摘要: The lipid droplet (LD) is a cellular organelle that stores neutral lipids in cells and has been linked with metabolic disorders. Caenorhabditis elegans has many characteristics which make it an excellent animal model for studying LDs. However, unlike in mammalian cells, no LD structure-like/resident proteins have been identified in C. elegans, which has limited the utility of this model for the study of lipid storage and metabolism. Herein based on three lines of evidence, we identified that MDT-28 and DHS-3 previously identified in C. elegans LD proteome were two LD structure-like/resident proteins. First, MDT-28 and DHS-3 were found to be the two most abundant LD proteins in the worm. Second, the proteins were specifically localized to LDs and we identified the domains responsible for this targeting in both proteins. Third and most importantly, the depletion of MDT-28 induced LD clustering while DHS-3 deletion reduced triacylglycerol content (TAG). We further characterized the proteins finding that MDT-28 was ubiquitously expressed in the intestine, muscle, hypodermis, and embryos, whereas DHS-3 was expressed mainly in intestinal cells. Together, these two LD structure-like/resident proteins provide a basis for future mechanistic studies into the dynamics and functions of LDs in C. elegans. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.