A smart imaging workflow for organ-specific screening in a cystic kidney zebrafish disease model

The zebrafish is being increasingly used in biomedical research and drug discovery to conduct large-scale compound screening. However, there is a lack of accessible methodologies to enable automated imaging and scoring of tissue-specific phenotypes at enhanced resolution. Here, we present the develo...

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Hauptverfasser: Pandey, Gunjan (VerfasserIn) , Westhoff, Jens (VerfasserIn) , Schaefer, Franz (VerfasserIn) , Gehrig, Jochen (VerfasserIn)
Dokumenttyp: Article (Journal)
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: 14 March 2019
In: International journal of molecular sciences
Year: 2019, Jahrgang: 20, Heft: 6
ISSN:1422-0067
DOI:10.3390/ijms20061290
Online-Zugang:Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20061290
Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/20/6/1290
Volltext
Verfasserangaben:Gunjan Pandey, Jens H. Westhoff, Franz Schaefer and Jochen Gehrig
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:The zebrafish is being increasingly used in biomedical research and drug discovery to conduct large-scale compound screening. However, there is a lack of accessible methodologies to enable automated imaging and scoring of tissue-specific phenotypes at enhanced resolution. Here, we present the development of an automated imaging pipeline to identify chemical modifiers of glomerular cyst formation in a zebrafish model for human cystic kidney disease. Morpholino-mediated knockdown of intraflagellar transport protein Ift172 in Tg(wt1b:EGFP) embryos was used to induce large glomerular cysts representing a robustly scorable phenotypic readout. Compound-treated embryos were consistently aligned within the cavities of agarose-filled microplates. By interfacing feature detection algorithms with automated microscopy, a smart imaging workflow for detection, centring and zooming in on regions of interests was established, which enabled the automated capturing of standardised higher resolution datasets of pronephric areas. High-content screening datasets were processed and analysed using custom-developed heuristic algorithms implemented in common open-source image analysis software. The workflow enables highly efficient profiling of entire compound libraries and scoring of kidney-specific morphological phenotypes in thousands of zebrafish embryos. The demonstrated toolset covers all the aspects of a complex whole organism screening assay and can be adapted to other organs, specimens or applications.
Beschreibung:Gesehen am 06.03.2020
Beschreibung:Online Resource
ISSN:1422-0067
DOI:10.3390/ijms20061290