Processing live images of the developing nervous system

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Understanding development is a critical step in understanding how an organism functions. One of the key aspects of understanding animal development requires the ability to watch during development how proteins interact with each other and how they generate signals within and between cells that help coordinate development. A powerful tool to do this is to use fluorescent tags attached to proteins with a live cell or tissue to study development. These tags come in a wide range of colour from blue, green, orange, yellow, red and even far-red. This means that researchers can study many proteins at the same time in a living cell to obtain a clear picture on how these proteins interact and what signals they generate. For instance, during the development of the nervous system, how cells migrate or extend processes to their final positions in the nervous system can be investigated. By following how cells move and signal in real time (i.e. live) provides far more information about how development is controlled than traditional approaches that fixed the cell in place. For these approaches, imaging these proteins within developing cells or tissues is required. A specialized microscope that uses high magnification but can detect faint signals without killing the cells is essential. The Deltavision microscope is an excellent example of a system that allows live cells to be imaged for hours without any damage and allows many labels to be followed in the same cell. However this system needs a separate, fast, powerful computer to manipulate the images rapidly to allow for high resolution digital images to be processed efficiently.