Application of a Morphological Similarity Measure to the Analysis of Shell Morphogenesis in Foraminifera

This work evaluates the genotype-to-phenotype mapping defined by one of the models of growth of foraminifera. Foraminifera are simple unicellular organisms with very diverse morphologies. To analyze the mapping, a morphological similarity measure is needed that compares 3D structures. One of the key components of the similarity estimation algorithm is Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Since this algorithm is heavily used and its performance is important, four SVD implementations have been compared in this work. Distance matrices of the phenotypes obtained for equally distant genotypes were computed using the similarity measure. For the visualization of the phenotype space, multidimensional scaling techniques were used. Visual comparison of the genotype and the phenotype spaces revealed characteristics and potential weaknesses of the analyzed model of foraminifera growth, and demonstrated usefulness of the proposed approach.