Omer Ishaq

Compaction of rolling circle amplification products increases signal integrity and signal–to–noise ratio

Rolling circle amplification (RCA) for generation of distinct fluorescent signals in situ relies upon the self-collapsing properties of single-stranded DNA in commonly used RCA-based methods. By introducing a cross-hybridizing DNA oligonucleotide during rolling circle amplification, we demonstrate that the fluorophore-labeled RCA products (RCPs) become smaller. The reduced size of RCPs increases the local concentration of fluorophores and as a result, the signal intensity increases together with the signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, we have found that RCPs sometimes tend to disintegrate and may be recorded as several RCPs, a trait that is prevented with our cross-hybridizing DNA oligonucleotide. These effects generated by compaction of RCPs improve accuracy of visual as well as automated in situ analysis for RCA based methods, such as proximity ligation assays (PLA) and padlock probes.

Bridging Histology and Bioinformatics—Computational Analysis of Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics

It is well known that cells in tissue display a large heterogeneity in gene expression due to differences in cell lineage origin and variation in the local environment. Traditional methods that analyze gene expression from bulk RNA extracts fail to accurately describe this heterogeneity because of their intrinsic limitation in cellular and spatial resolution. Also, information on histology in the form of tissue architecture and organization is lost in the process. Recently, new transcriptome-wide analysis technologies have enabled the study of RNA molecules directly in tissue samples, thus maintaining spatial resolution and complementing histological information with molecular information important for the understanding of many biological processes and potentially relevant for the clinical management of cancer patients. These new methods generally comprise three levels of analysis. At the first level, biochemical techniques are used to generate signals that can be imaged by different means of fluorescence microscopy. At the second level, images are subject to digital image processing and analysis in order to detect and identify the aforementioned signals. At the third level, the collected data are analyzed and transformed into interpretable information by statistical methods and visualization techniques relating them to each other, to spatial distribution, and to tissue morphology. In this review, we describe state-of-the-art techniques used at all three levels of analysis. Finally, we discuss future perspective in this fast-growing field of spatially resolved transcriptomics.

Automated quantification of Zebrafish tail deformation for high-throughput drug screening

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an important vertebrate model organism in biomedical research thanks to its ease of handling and translucent body, enabling in vivo imaging. Zebrafish embryos undergo spinal deformation upon exposure to chemical agents that inhibit DNA repair. Automated image-based quantification of spine deformation is therefore attractive for whole-organism based assays for use in early-phase drug discovery. We propose an automated method for accurate high-throughput measurement of tail deformations in multi-fish micro-plate wells. The method generates refined medial representations of partial tail-segments. Subsequently, these disjoint segments are analyzed and fused to generate complete tails. Based on estimated tail curvatures we reach a classification accuracy of 91% on individual animals as compared to known control treatment. This accuracy is increased to 95% when combining scores for fish in the same well.

Deep Fish : Deep Learning-Based Classification of Zebrafish Deformation for High-Throughput Screening

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an important vertebrate model organism in biomedical research, especially suitable for morphological screening due to its transparent body during early development. Deep learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for data analysis and found a number of applications in computer vision and image analysis. Here we demonstrate the potential of a deep learning approach for accurate high-throughput classification of whole-body zebrafish deformations in multifish microwell plates. Deep learning uses the raw image data as an input, without the need of expert knowledge for feature design or optimization of the segmentation parameters. We trained the deep learning classifier on as few as 84 images (before data augmentation) and achieved a classification accuracy of 92.8% on an unseen test data set that is comparable to the previous state of the art (95%) based on user-specified segmentation and deformation metrics. Ablation studies by digitally removing whole fish or parts of the fish from the images revealed that the classifier learned discriminative features from the image foreground, and we observed that the deformations of the head region, rather than the visually apparent bent tail, were more important for good classification performance.

An Evaluation of the Faster STORM Method for Super-resolution Microscopy

Development of new stochastic super-resolution methods together with fluorescence microscopy imaging enables visualization of biological processes at increasing spatial and temporal resolution. Quantitative evaluation of such imaging experiments call for computational analysis methods that localize the signals with high precision and recall. Furthermore, it is desirable that the methods are fast and possible to parallelize so that the ever increasing amounts of collected data can be handled in an efficient way. We herein address signal detection in super-resolution microscopy by approaches based on compressed sensing. We describe how a previously published approach can be parallelized, reducing processing time at least four times. We also evaluate the effect of a greedy optimization approach on signal recovery at high noise and molecule density. Furthermore, our evaluation reveals how previously published compressed sensing algorithms have a performance that degrades to that of a random signal detector at high molecule density. Finally, we show the approximation of the imaging systems point spread function affects recall and precision of signal detection, illustrating the importance of parameter optimization. We evaluate the methods on synthetic data with varying signal to noise ratio and increasing molecular density, and visualize performance on real super-resolution microscopy data from a time-lapse sequence of living cells.