CellMAPtracer

CellMAPtracer tracks migratory and proliferating cells in long-term live-cell imaging to quantify migration dynamics and cell-cycle–linked changes in cell behavior.

Key Features:

• Semi-automated supervised tracking: Provides a semi-automated, user-supervised workflow that allows oversight and refinement of automatically detected cell tracks.
• Long-term tracking capability: Enables monitoring of individual cells over extended time courses to capture prolonged migration and proliferation events.
• Multi-daughter division tracking: Detects and follows multi-daughter division events in which a single cell yields more than two daughter cells.
• Quantitative cell-dynamics analysis: Calculates migration metrics such as speed and directionality and assesses changes in these parameters across different cell-cycle phases.

Scientific Applications:

• Fluorescently-labelled BT549 breast cancer cells: Applied to track fluorescently-labelled BT549 cells to monitor their migration and division behavior.
• Daughter cell fate and division analysis: Used to follow dividing cells and assess daughter-cell fate with respect to migration characteristics and cell-cycle dynamics.
• Cell-cycle terminal-phase speed changes: Enabled identification of previously unreported changes in cell speed during the terminal phase of the cell cycle.

Methodology:

Combines advanced imaging with computational tracking algorithms and a semi-automated, user-supervised correction of automatically detected cell tracks.