Estimating Microtubule Distributions from 2D Immunofluorescence Microscopy Images Reveals Differences among Human Cultured Cell Lines
Figure 1
Growth model for generating microtubules dependent on cell and nuclear shapes.
Each microtubule starts from the centrosome, and randomly grows to the second point on the lateral surface of a cone whose aperture is 2α. Then the microtubule grows the same way until it hits the cell or nuclear shape boundary and is not able to step further within the cytosolic area. At this time, we relax the collinearity requirement but still confine the next direction under the local constraint αlocal. Moreover, we also keep on checking a consecutive multiple (30) steps, and require that there are less than or equal to 3 pairwise vector angles that are larger than the global constraint αglobal. Beginning with an empty (black) cytosolic area (shaped by cell and nuclear boundary), we add one to the intensity of the pixel which a microtubule crosses. In this paper, we used every step of growth to be 0.2 microns (1 pixel). For the two constraints on the collinearity which controls the curvature of each microtubule and the local and global rebounding issues, we used αlocal to be 63.9 degrees and αglobal to be 120 degrees. The figure only illustrates the procedure of growth in 2D for better visualization but can be easily imagined to extend to 3D.