TY - JOUR A1 - Schindler, Daniel A1 - Moldenhawer, Ted A1 - Stange, Maike A1 - Lepro, Valentino A1 - Beta, Carsten A1 - Holschneider, Matthias A1 - Huisinga, Wilhelm T1 - Analysis of protrusion dynamics in amoeboid cell motility by means of regularized contour flows JF - PLoS Computational Biology : a new community journal N2 - Amoeboid cell motility is essential for a wide range of biological processes including wound healing, embryonic morphogenesis, and cancer metastasis. It relies on complex dynamical patterns of cell shape changes that pose long-standing challenges to mathematical modeling and raise a need for automated and reproducible approaches to extract quantitative morphological features from image sequences. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework and a computational method for obtaining smooth representations of the spatiotemporal contour dynamics from stacks of segmented microscopy images. Based on a Gaussian process regression we propose a one-parameter family of regularized contour flows that allows us to continuously track reference points (virtual markers) between successive cell contours. We use this approach to define a coordinate system on the moving cell boundary and to represent different local geometric quantities in this frame of reference. In particular, we introduce the local marker dispersion as a measure to identify localized membrane expansions and provide a fully automated way to extract the properties of such expansions, including their area and growth time. The methods are available as an open-source software package called AmoePy, a Python-based toolbox for analyzing amoeboid cell motility (based on time-lapse microscopy data), including a graphical user interface and detailed documentation. Due to the mathematical rigor of our framework, we envision it to be of use for the development of novel cell motility models. We mainly use experimental data of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum to illustrate and validate our approach.
Author summary Amoeboid motion is a crawling-like cell migration that plays an important key role in multiple biological processes such as wound healing and cancer metastasis. This type of cell motility results from expanding and simultaneously contracting parts of the cell membrane. From fluorescence images, we obtain a sequence of points, representing the cell membrane, for each time step. By using regression analysis on these sequences, we derive smooth representations, so-called contours, of the membrane. Since the number of measurements is discrete and often limited, the question is raised of how to link consecutive contours with each other. In this work, we present a novel mathematical framework in which these links are described by regularized flows allowing a certain degree of concentration or stretching of neighboring reference points on the same contour. This stretching rate, the so-called local dispersion, is used to identify expansions and contractions of the cell membrane providing a fully automated way of extracting properties of these cell shape changes. We applied our methods to time-lapse microscopy data of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009268 SN - 1553-734X SN - 1553-7358 VL - 17 IS - 8 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Moldenhawer, Ted A1 - Moreno, Eduardo A1 - Schindler, Daniel A1 - Flemming, Sven A1 - Holschneider, Matthias A1 - Huisinga, Wilhelm A1 - Alonso, Sergio A1 - Beta, Carsten T1 - Spontaneous transitions between amoeboid and keratocyte-like modes of migration JF - Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology N2 - The motility of adherent eukaryotic cells is driven by the dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton. Despite the common force-generating actin machinery, different cell types often show diverse modes of locomotion that differ in their shape dynamics, speed, and persistence of motion. Recently, experiments in Dictyostelium discoideum have revealed that different motility modes can be induced in this model organism, depending on genetic modifications, developmental conditions, and synthetic changes of intracellular signaling. Here, we report experimental evidence that in a mutated D. discoideum cell line with increased Ras activity, switches between two distinct migratory modes, the amoeboid and fan-shaped type of locomotion, can even spontaneously occur within the same cell. We observed and characterized repeated and reversible switchings between the two modes of locomotion, suggesting that they are distinct behavioral traits that coexist within the same cell. We adapted an established phenomenological motility model that combines a reaction-diffusion system for the intracellular dynamics with a dynamic phase field to account for our experimental findings. KW - cell migration KW - amoeboid motility KW - keratocytle-like motility KW - modes of KW - migration KW - D. discoideum KW - actin dynamics Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2022.898351 SN - 2296-634X VL - 10 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne ER -