An unbiased, automated platform for scoring dopaminergic neurodegeneration in C. elegans

Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) has served as a simple model organism to study dopaminergic neurodegeneration, as it enables quantitative analysis of cellular and sub-cellular morphologies in live animals. These isogenic nematodes have a rapid life cycle and transparent body, making high-throughput imaging and evaluation of fluorescently tagged neurons possible. However, the current state-of-the-art method for quantifying dopaminergic degeneration requires researchers to manually examine images and score dendrites into groups of varying levels of neurodegeneration severity, which is time-consuming, subject to bias, and limited in data sensitivity. We aim to overcome the pitfalls of manual neuron scoring by developing an automated, unbiased image processing algorithm to quantify dopaminergic neurodegeneration in C. elegans. The algorithm can be used on images acquired with different microscopy setups and only requires two inputs: a maximum projection image of the four cephalic neuron..., ,