Computational Motility Tracking of Calcium Dynamics in Toxoplasma gondii

08/01/2017
by   Mojtaba Sedigh Fazli, et al.
0

Toxoplasma gondii is the causative agent responsible for toxoplasmosis and serves as one of the most common parasites in the world. For a successful lytic cycle, T. gondii must traverse biological barriers in order to invade host cells, and as such, motility is critical for its virulence. Calcium signaling, governed by fluctuations in cytosolic calcium (Ca2+) concentrations, is utilized universally across life and regulates many cellular processes, including the stimulation of T. gondii virulence factors such as motility. Therefore, increases in cytosolic calcium, called calcium oscillations, serve as a means to link and quantify the intracellular signaling processes that lead to T. gondii motility and invasion. Here, we describe our work extracting, quantifying and modeling motility patterns of T. gondii before and after the addition of pharmacological drugs and/or extracellular calcium. We demonstrate a computational pipeline including a robust tracking system using optical flow and dense trajectory features to extract T. gondii motility patterns. Using this pipeline, we were able to track changes in T.gondii motility in response to cytosolic Ca2+ fluxes in extracellular parasites. This allows us to study how Ca2+ signaling via release from intracellular Ca2+ stores and/or from extracellular Ca2+ entry relates to motility patterns, a crucial first step in developing countermeasures for T. gondii virulence.

READ FULL TEXT

page 3

page 4

page 6

page 7

research
01/08/2018

Unsupervised Discovery of Toxoplasma gondii Motility Phenotypes

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic protozoan that causes dis- seminated to...
research
01/28/2019

DeGraF-Flow: Extending DeGraF Features for accurate and efficient sparse-to-dense optical flow estimation

Modern optical flow methods make use of salient scene feature points det...
research
08/10/2019

Lightweight and Scalable Particle Tracking and Motion Clustering of 3D Cell Trajectories

Tracking cell particles in 3D microscopy videos is a challenging task bu...
research
10/09/2020

Robust Instance Tracking via Uncertainty Flow

Current state-of-the-art trackers often fail due to distractorsand large...
research
10/19/2019

Tracking-Assisted Segmentation of Biological Cells

U-Net and its variants have been demonstrated to work sufficiently well ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset