Image analysis for structural genomics

Abstract

Major success has been achieved in recent years in understanding the function of the genome. It also became evident that the structure and organization of the genome in the nucleus is important, it changes along the cell cycle and during cancer progression. For structural and organizational studies to take place, it is required to apply markers, probe regions of interest (wetware), and acquire images (hardware), tasks that have reached a mature state. For successful interpretation, a last step has to be made: analysis of the images (software). To obtain quantitative results, the first two components (wetware and hardware) have to be taken into account in the software and algorithms.

We studied the spatial organization of telomeres and centromeres. Telomeres were studied during the cell cycle of normal mammalian cells and after c-Myc deregulation and centromeres were studied in normal, senescent and apoptotic human mesenchymal stem cells.

We will present the algorithms that were developed and some of the results. Novel processes have been discovered, including the cell-cycle dependence of the telomeres, telomere aggregates during tumor progression and the re- distribution of centromeres during apoptosis.