Identifying Novel Drug Targets for the Treatment of Tuberous Sclerosis Complex Using High Throughput Technologies PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:

Visual inspection of cells is a fundamental tool fordiscovery in biological science. Modern robotic microscopes areable to capture thousands of images from massively parallelexperiments such as RNA interference (RNAi) or small-moleculescreens. Such screens also benefit from lab automation, makinglarge screens, e.g., genome-scale knockdown experiments, morefeasible and common. As such, the bottleneck in large, image-based screens has shifted to visual inspection and scoring byexperts.In this paper, we describe the methods we have developedfor automatic image cytometry. The paper demonstrates illu-mination normalization, foreground/background separation, cellsegmentation, and shows the benefits of using a large numberof individual cell measurements when exploring data from high-throughput screens.