Cellects, a software to quantify cell expansion and motion

Automated quantification offers unique opportunities to study biological phenomena, increasing reproducibility, replicability, accuracy, and throughput, while reducing observer biases. We present Cellects, a tool to quantify growth and motion in 2D. This software operates with image sequences containing specimens growing and moving on an immobile flat surface. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to adjust the quantification parameters to cover a wide range of species and conditions, and includes tools to validate the results and correct mistakes if necessary. The software provides the region covered by the specimens at each point of time, as well as many geometrical descriptors that characterize it. We validated Cellects with Physarum polycephalum, which is particularly difficult to detect because of its complex shape and internal heterogeneity. This validation covered five different conditions with different background and lighting, and found Cellects to be highly accurate in all cases. Cellects’ main strengths are its broad scope of action, automated computation of a variety of geometrical descriptors, easy installation and user-friendly interface.

Methods
Methodological information related to the analysis is available in the Cellects GitHub repository: https://github.com/Aurele-B/Cellects