We have built a digital nuclear atlas of the newly hatched, first larval stage (L1) of the wild type hermaphrodite of C. elegans at single cell resolution from confocal image stacks of 15 individuals. The atlas quantifies the stereotypy of the locations and provides for other statistics on the spatial patterns of the 357 nuclei that could be faithfully segmented and annotated of the 558 present at this developmental stage. Given this atlas we then developed an automated approach to assign cell names to each nucleus in a 3D image of an L1 worm. We achieve 86% accuracy in identifying the 357 nuclei automatically. This computational method is essential for high-throughput single cell analyses of the worm at post-embryonic stages, such as determining the expression of every gene in every cell during development from the L1 onward, or ablating or stimulating cells under computer control in a high-throughput functional screen.
展开▼
