A novel tracking and analysis system for time-lapse cellular imaging of Schizosaccharomyces pombe

The significance of employing the parent-progeny relationship tracking technique in single-cell analysis has grown with the passage of time. In this study, fundamental image processing techniques were amalgamated to develop software capable of inferring cell cycle alterations in fission yeasts exhibiting equipartition during division. These methods, exclusively relying on bright-field images as input, could track parent-progeny relationships after cellular division through the assessment of temporal morphological transformation of these cells. In the application of this technique, the software was employed for calculate the intracellular fluorescent dots during every stage of the cell cycle, leveraging the yeast strain GFP-fused Swi6, which is present in cells and binds to chromatin. The results obtained with this software were consistent with those of previous studies. This software facilitated the single-cell level tracking of parent-progeny relationships in cells exhibiting equipartition during division and enabled the monitoring of spatial fluctuations in cell cycle-dependent proteins. This method, expediting the analysis of extensive datasets, may also empower large-scale screening experiments that would be unfeasible to conduct manually.