- Article
- Published:
CellCognition: time-resolved phenotype annotation in high-throughput live cell imaging
- Michael Held1,2,
- Michael H A Schmitz1,2,
- Bernd Fischer3,
- Thomas Walter4,
- Beate Neumann5,
- Michael H Olma1,
- Matthias Peter1,
- Jan Ellenberg4 &
- …
- Daniel W Gerlich1,2
Nature Methodsvolume 7, pages747–754 (2010)Cite this article
8561Accesses
254Citations
7Altmetric
Abstract
Fluorescence time-lapse imaging has become a powerful tool to investigate complex dynamic processes such as cell division or intracellular trafficking. Automated microscopes generate time-resolved imaging data at high throughput, yet tools for quantification of large-scale movie data are largely missing. Here we present CellCognition, a computational framework to annotate complex cellular dynamics. We developed a machine-learning method that combines state-of-the-art classification with hidden Markov modeling for annotation of the progression through morphologically distinct biological states. Incorporation of time information into the annotation scheme was essential to suppress classification noise at state transitions and confusion between different functional states with similar morphology. We demonstrate generic applicability in different assays and perturbation conditions, including a candidate-based RNA interference screen for regulators of mitotic exit in human cells. CellCognition is published as open source software, enabling live-cell imaging–based screening with assays that directly score cellular dynamics.
This is a preview of subscription content,access via your institution
Access options
Subscription info for Japanese customers
We have a dedicated website for our Japanese customers. Please go tonatureasia.com to subscribe to this journal.
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout





Similar content being viewed by others
References
Conrad, C. & Gerlich, D.W. Automated microscopy for high-content RNAi screening.J. Cell Biol.188, 453–461 (2010).
Doil, C. et al. RNF168 binds and amplifies ubiquitin conjugates on damaged chromosomes to allow accumulation of repair proteins.Cell136, 435–446 (2009).
Collinet, C. et al. Systems survey of endocytosis by multiparametric image analysis.Nature464, 243–249 (2010).
Sonnichsen, B. et al. Full-genome RNAi profiling of early embryogenesis inCaenorhabditis elegans.Nature434, 462–469 (2005).
Goshima, G. et al. Genes required for mitotic spindle assembly inDrosophila S2 cells.Science316, 417–421 (2007).
Neumann, B. et al. Phenotypic profiling of the human genome by time-lapse microscopy reveals cell division genes.Nature464, 721–727 (2010).
Neumann, B. et al. High-throughput RNAi screening by time-lapse imaging of live human cells.Nat. Methods3, 385–390 (2006).
Loo, L.H., Wu, L.F. & Altschuler, S.J. Image-based multivariate profiling of drug responses from single cells.Nat. Methods4, 445–453 (2007).
Conrad, C. et al. Automatic identification of subcellular phenotypes on human cell arrays.Genome Res.14, 1130–1136 (2004).
Glory, E. & Murphy, R.F. Automated subcellular location determination and high-throughput microscopy.Dev. Cell12, 7–16 (2007).
Harder, N. et al. Automatic analysis of dividing cells in live cell movies to detect mitotic delays and correlate phenotypes in time.Genome Res.19, 2113–2124 (2009).
Zhou, X., Li, F., Yan, J. & Wong, S.T. A novel cell segmentation method and cell phase identification using Markov model.IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed.13, 152–157 (2009).
Gerlich, D. & Ellenberg, J. 4D imaging to assay complex dynamics in live specimens.Nat. Cell Biol.5, S14–S19 (2003).
Schmitz, M.H. & Gerlich, D.W. Automated live microscopy to study mitotic gene function in fluorescent reporter cell lines.Methods Mol. Biol.545, 113–134 (2009).
Boland, M.V. & Murphy, R.F. A neural network classifier capable of recognizing the patterns of all major subcellular structures in fluorescence microscope images of HeLa cells.Bioinformatics17, 1213–1223 (2001).
Wahlby, C., Sintorn, I.M., Erlandsson, F. & Borgefors, G. Combining intensity, edge and shape information for 2D and 3D segmentation of cell nuclei in tissue sections.J. Microscopy215, 67–76 (2004).
Walker, R. & Jackway, P. Statistical geometric features-extensions for cytological textureanalysis.Proc. 13th Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition2, 790–794 (1996).
Haralick, R., Dinstein & Shanmugam Textural features for image classification.IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics3, 610–621 (1973).
Boser, B.E., Guyon, I. & Vapnik, V. A training algorithm for optimal margin classifiers.COLT ′92: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Workshop on Computational Learning Theory (1992).
Wang, M. et al. Novel cell segmentation and online SVM for cell cycle phase identification in automated microscopy.Bioinformatics24, 94–101 (2008).
Chen, X., Zhou, X. & Wong, S.T. Automated segmentation, classification, and tracking of cancer cell nuclei in time-lapse microscopy.IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng.53, 762–766 (2006).
Durbin, R.R., Eddy, S., Krogh, A. & Mitchison, G.Biological sequence analysis: probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Viterbi, A. Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum decoding algorithm.IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory13, 260–269 (1967).
Baum, L.E., Petrie, T., Soules, G. & Weiss, N. A maximization technique occurring in the statistical analysis of probabilistic functions of Markov chains.Ann. Math. Stat.41, 164–171 (1970).
Dempster, A.P., Laird, N.M. & Rubin, D.B. Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm.J. R. Stat. Soc. B39, 1–3 (1977).
Meraldi, P., Draviam, V.M. & Sorger, P.K. Timing and checkpoints in the regulation of mitotic progression.Dev. Cell7, 45–60 (2004).
Hagting, A. et al. Human securin proteolysis is controlled by the spindle checkpoint and reveals when the APC/C switches from activation by Cdc20 to Cdh1.J. Cell Biol.157, 1125–1137 (2002).
Bollen, M., Gerlich, D.W. & Lesage, B. Mitotic phosphatases: from entry guards to exit guides.Trends Cell Biol.19, 606–616 (2009).
Wolthuis, R. et al. Cdc20 and Cks direct the spindle checkpoint-independent destruction of cyclin A.Mol. Cell30, 290–302 (2008).
Wang, M., Zhou, X., King, R.W. & Wong, S.T. Context based mixture model for cell phase identification in automated fluorescence microscopy.BMC Bioinformatics8, 32 (2007).
Erfle, H. et al. Reverse transfection on cell arrays for high content screening microscopy.Nat. Protoc.2, 392–399 (2007).
Snapp, E.L. et al. Formation of stacked ER cisternae by low affinity protein interactions.J. Cell Biol.163, 257–269 (2003).
Dultz, E. et al. Systematic kinetic analysis of mitotic dis- and reassembly of the nuclear pore in living cells.J. Cell Biol.180, 857–865 (2008).
Schaub, B.E., Berger, B., Berger, E.G. & Rohrer, J. Transition of galactosyltransferase 1 from trans-Golgi cisterna to the trans-Golgi network is signal mediated.Mol. Biol. Cell17, 5153–5162 (2006).
Leonhardt, H. et al. Dynamics of DNA replication factories in living cells.J. Cell Biol.149, 271–280 (2000).
Steigemann, P. et al. Aurora B-mediated abscission checkpoint protects against tetraploidization.Cell136, 473–484 (2009).
Wu, T.F., Lin, C.J. & Weng, R.C. Probability estimates for multi-class classification by pairwise coupling.J. Machine Learning Res.5, 975–1005 (2004).
Acknowledgements
We thank C. Conrad and W.H. Gerlich for critical comments on the manuscript, F.O. Gathmann for helpful discussions about software engineering, N. Graf for outstanding information technology support, G. Csucs, members of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) Light Microscopy Center and members of the ETHZ RNAi Screening Center for technical support, J. Rohrer (University of Zurich) for providing GalT-EGFP plasmid, J. Pines (Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, UK) for providing Securin-EYFP and cyclin B1–EGFP plasmids, K. Beck and U. Kutay for providing images of cells expressing fluorescent α-tubulin and histone H2B, and Q. Zhong for generating the plot forSupplementary Figure 1. Work in the Gerlich laboratory is supported by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) research grant 3100A0-114120, SNF ProDoc grant PDFMP3_124904, a European Young Investigator award of the European Science Foundation, an EMBO fellowship, Young Investigator Programme and Marine Biological Laboratory Summer Research Fellowship to D.W.G., a grant by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-TH), a grant by the UBS foundation, a Roche Ph.D. fellowship to M.H.A.S. and a Mueller fellowship of the Molecular Life Sciences Ph.D. program Zurich to M.H. B.F. was supported by European Commission's seventh framework program project Cancer Pathways. Work in the Ellenberg laboratory is supported by a European Commission grant within the Mitocheck consortium (LSHG-CT-2004-503464). Work in the Peter laboratory is supported by the ETHZ, Oncosuisse, SystemsX.ch (LiverX) and the SNF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Institute of Biochemistry, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Michael Held, Michael H A Schmitz, Michael H Olma, Matthias Peter & Daniel W Gerlich
Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA
Michael Held, Michael H A Schmitz & Daniel W Gerlich
Genome Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
Bernd Fischer
Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
Thomas Walter & Jan Ellenberg
Advanced Light Microscopy Facility, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
Beate Neumann
- Michael Held
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Michael H A Schmitz
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Bernd Fischer
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Thomas Walter
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Beate Neumann
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Michael H Olma
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Matthias Peter
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Jan Ellenberg
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
- Daniel W Gerlich
You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar
Contributions
M.H. designed the image analysis workflow, implemented the software, performed imaging experiments and prepared the manuscript. M.H.A.S. established stable cell lines, performed most imaging and all RNAi experiments. B.F. designed and implemented the hidden Markov model. T.W. designed parts of the feature extraction and of the image analysis workflow. B.N. and J.E. generated the siRNA cell transfection array. M.H.O. and M.P. established live imaging of EGFP-PCNA. D.W.G. designed assays and the general strategy for image processing and wrote the paper.
Corresponding author
Correspondence toDaniel W Gerlich.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Text and Figures
Supplementary Figures 1–8 and Supplementary Tables 1–6 (PDF 4136 kb)
Supplementary Movie 1
Time-lapse imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing the fluorescent chromatin marker H2B-mCherry (imaged with widefield epifluorescence 20× dry objective). The movie shows a region of interest of 512 × 512 × 30 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames); overall movie dimensions: 1,392 × 1,040 × 206 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 4.6 min. (MOV 3869 kb)
Supplementary Movie 2
Object detection and supervised classification of morphologies. The contours were derived by the automated segmentation, and the color code for different morphology classes is as indicated in Figure 1b. Original data are shown inSupplementary Movie 1. (MOV 5220 kb)
Supplementary Movie 3
Automated extraction of mitotic events. The movie displays 100 randomly selected examples for cells progressing through mitosis (same as in Fig. 2a). The cells werein silico synchronized to the prophase-prometaphase transition and sorted based on total prometaphase and metaphase duration. The morphology classes annotated as in Figure 2a are indicated by color-coding as in Figure 1b. (MOV 7115 kb)
Supplementary Movie 4
Classification error correction based on free hidden Markov model. The same cells as shown in Figure 2a andSupplementary Movie 3 were classified based on morphological features as well as the temporal context. (MOV 7102 kb)
Supplementary Movie 5
Time-lapse imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing the fluorescent chromatin marker H2B-mCherry (red) and mEGFP–α-tubulin (green) with widefield epifluorescence 20× dry objective. The movie shows a region of interest of 512 × 512 × 30 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 206 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 4.6 min. (MOV 5368 kb)
Supplementary Movie 6
Annotation of spindle dynamics in movies of cells expressing H2B-mCherry and mEGFP–α-tubulin. The movie displays 100 randomly selected examples for automatically annotated cells progressing through mitosis (same as in Fig. 3d). The cells werein silico synchronized to the prophase-prometaphase transition in the H2B-mCherry channel and sorted by total prometaphase and metaphase duration. The morphology classes are indicated by color-coding as indicated in Figure 3a. (MOV 5250 kb)
Supplementary Movie 7
Time-lapse imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing the fluorescent chromatin marker H2B-mCherry (red) and GalT-EGFP (green) with widefield epifluorescence 10× dry objective. The movie shows a region of interest of 512 × 512 × 30 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 482 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 2.8 min. (MOV 6705 kb)
Supplementary Movie 8
Annotation of Golgi dynamics in movies of cells expressing H2B-mCherry and GalT-EGFP. The movie displays 100 randomly selected examples for automatically annotated cells progressing through mitosis (same as in Fig. 3e). The cells werein silico synchronized to the prophase-prometaphase transition in the H2B-mCherry channel and sorted by total prometaphase and metaphase duration. The morphology classes are indicated by color-coding as indicated in Figure 3b. (MOV 4404 kb)
Supplementary Movie 9
Time-lapse imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing the fluorescent chromatin marker H2B-mCherry (red) and DNA replication factory marker EGFP-PCNA (green) with widefield epifluorescence 10× dry objective. The movie shows a region of interest of 350 × 350 × 54 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames); every second time point shown). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 482 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 5.9 min. (MOV 4455 kb)
Supplementary Movie 10
Annotation of S-phase progression in movies of cells expressing H2B-mCherry and EGFP-PCNA. The movie displays 100 randomly selected examples for automatically annotated cells progressing through the cell cycle (same as in Fig. 3f). The cells werein silico synchronized to the G1–early S phase transition in the EGFP-PCNA channel and sorted by total S-phase duration. Every second time point of original data is shown. The morphology classes are indicated by color-coding as indicated in Figure 3c. (MOV 6914 kb)
Supplementary Movie 11
Time-lapse imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and Securin-mEGFP with widefield epifluorescence 20× dry objective, treated with 50 ng ml–1 nocodazole immediately before starting the imaging. The movie shows a region of interest of 400 × 400 × 100 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 500 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 2.7 min. (MOV 7547 kb)
Supplementary Movie 12
Time-lapse imaging of Mad2 siRNA transfected HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and Securin-mEGFP with widefield epifluorescence 20× dry objective. The movie shows a region of interest of 400 × 400 × 100 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 500 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames); time lapse, 2.7 min). (MOV 7584 kb)
Supplementary Movie 13
Time-lapse imaging of untreated control HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and Securin-mEGFP with widefield epifluorescence 20× dry objective. The movie shows a region of interest of 400 × 400 × 100 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)). The overall movie dimensions were 1,392 × 1,040 × 500 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 2.7 min. (MOV 7700 kb)
Supplementary Movie 14
Time-lapse imaging of control HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and IBB-EGFP transfected with nonsilencing siRNA, using widefield epifluorescence 10× dry objective. The movie shows 80 time frames of the entire imaging field downsampled inx/y by a factor of 2 for display. Original movie dimensions: 1,392 × 1,040 × 744 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 3.7 min. We captured 108 movies of different RNAi conditions simultaneously in this experiment by multilocation time-lapse imaging. (MOV 9091 kb)
Supplementary Movie 15
Time-lapse confocal imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and mEGFP-α- tubulin (63× oil immersion objective). Cells were transfected with non-silencing siRNA. Movie dimensions are 512 × 512 × 132 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 7.1 min. (MOV 9662 kb)
Supplementary Movie 16
Time-lapse confocal imaging of HeLa cells stably expressing H2B-mCherry and mEGFP–α-tubulin (63× oil immersion objective). Cells were transfected with siRNA targeting Cdc20. Movie dimensions are 512 × 512 × 132 (x ×y ×t (pixel × pixel × frames)); time lapse, 7.1 min. (MOV 9753 kb)
Supplementary Software
CellCognition software. (ZIP 80982 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Held, M., Schmitz, M., Fischer, B.et al. CellCognition: time-resolved phenotype annotation in high-throughput live cell imaging.Nat Methods7, 747–754 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1486
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
Share this article
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
This article is cited by
Morphodynamical cell state description via live-cell imaging trajectory embedding
- Jeremy Copperman
- Sean M. Gross
- Daniel M. Zuckerman
Communications Biology (2023)
Morphodynamics facilitate cancer cells to navigate 3D extracellular matrix
- Christopher Z. Eddy
- Helena Raposo
- Bo Sun
Scientific Reports (2021)
Phenotyping analysis of maize stem using micro-computed tomography at the elongation and tasseling stages
- Ying Zhang
- Liming Ma
- Jianjun Du
Plant Methods (2020)
Chemogenetic Control of Nanobodies
- Helen Farrants
- Miroslaw Tarnawski
- Kai Johnsson
Nature Methods (2020)
High content screening for drug discovery from traditional Chinese medicine
- Jing Wang
- Ming-Yue Wu
- Jia-Hong Lu
Chinese Medicine (2019)