GraFT: A robust network-based spatiotemporal analysis of filamentous structures.

Abstract

The actin cytoskeleton forms a dynamic network composed of filaments that remain flexible when bundled up, leading to complex filamentous structures in plant cells. Understanding the properties of these filamentous structures under different conditions and in different cell types can provide insight into their function. Yet, despite developments in the study of the plant actin cytoskeleton, it remains challenging to segment and identify actin filamentous structures, preventing quantification of their spatiotemporal properties. To address this problem, we devised a network-based approach termed Graph of Filaments over Time (GraFT) to trace and track filamentous structures in cytoskeleton networks extracted from two-dimensional time series imaging data. Our comparative analyses using both synthetic test cases and real-world actin cytoskeleton networks of Arabidopsis thaliana hypocotyls exposed to different treatments demonstrated that GraFT accurately traces and tracks actin filamentous structures. Moreover, GraFT facilitates automated quantification of properties for filamentous structures, providing fine-grained insights of effects of different treatments on the level of individual structures. Therefore, GraFT offers a substantial step toward an automated framework facilitating robust spatiotemporal studies of the plant actin cytoskeleton.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物細胞の画像時系列からアクチン繊維構造を追跡・セグメント化し、その時空間特性を自動定量する手法の開発と検証が中心であるため。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly release the GraFT tool and data-processing code on GitHub (MIT licensed) with an archived Zenodo version. The paper-specific data files are stated to be on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10476058), but that URL is not among the allowed URLs, so only the code assets are reported. The SciencePlot