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Student Class

2026

Student Affiliation

Presidential Scholar

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0428-228X

First Advisor

Brittany A. Goods

First Advisor Department

Department of Engineering Sciences—Thayer School of Engineering

Second Advisor

Soni Lacefield

Second Advisor Department

Geisel School of Medicine

Description

This project explores a dataset of transmitted light microscopy images quantifying the impact of a knockout Moloney sarcoma oncogene (MOS) mutation in ovarian mouse models. MOS is highly expressed in oocytes undergoing meiotic division, and encodes a serine/threonine kinase protein which activates the MAP kinase cascade. Absence of MOS expression has been noted to coincide with loss of meiotic arrest, which impedes fertilization, as well as germline tumor growth. Oocytes were cultured from MOS-/- and wildtype mice, as well as wildtype oocytes activated with strontium chloride. Oocytes were cultured to develop masses and then imaged with transmitted light microscopy. Comparative analyses were performed between three analytical softwares—Cellpose, CellProfiler, and ImageJ—to determine the relative efficacy of these approaches in identifying mass boundaries, size, and abundance. ImageJ enables the most accurate identification of mass boundaries regardless of image preprocessing or quality. Cellpose is able to identify the boundaries of masses with similar accuracy to ImageJ in cells where masses and nuclei are of comparable size, but struggles to identify differentially-sized masses and introduces artifact measurements. CellProfiler analysis is performed through two modified pre-generated pipelines and through a custom pipeline; all three pipelines are able to preprocess and segment images based on value but perform poorly in the presence of stark value gradients, leading to under- or over-segmentation of mass boundaries. The necessity of pre-generating data on mass diameter to run CellProfiler decreases the accessibility of this approach due to the inherently large variation in mass size within this dataset.

Publication Date

5-27-2025

Keywords

Transmitted light microscopy, oocytes, Moloney sarcoma oncogene, image analysis

Disciplines

Bioinformatics | Computational Biology | Systems Biology

Comparing approaches to transmitted light image analysis in mouse oocyte masses

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