High-throughput analysis of spatio-temporal dynamics in Dictyostelium

Satoshi Sawai¹^,2 , Xiao-Juan Guan¹ , Adam Kuspa³ and Edward C Cox¹

¹Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

²ERATO Complex Systems Biology Project, JST, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

³Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2007, 8:R144doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-7-r144


Published:	21 July 2007

Subject areas: Development, Genetics, Methods, Genome studies

Abstract

We demonstrate a time-lapse video approach that allows rapid examination of the spatio-temporal dynamics of Dictyostelium cell populations. Quantitative information was gathered by sampling life histories of more than 2,000 mutant clones from a large mutagenesis collection. Approximately 4% of the clonal lines showed a mutant phenotype at one stage. Many of these could be ordered by clustering into functional groups. The dataset allows one to search and retrieve movies on a gene-by-gene and phenotype-by-phenotype basis.