Li, Ashlee

Mitochondrial dysfunction is the core of several neurodegenerative diseases that include Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia (FTD), and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). One strategy to understand these diseases is to analyze the geometry of mitochondria in different neuron types: motor (ALS) and brain neurons (FTD/AD). A bottleneck in assessing the quality of mitochondria in healthy versus ALS/FTD/AD flies was performing image analysis on hundreds of microscope images. In this project, we developed a program to automate this tedious process. We collaborated with the Ron Davis Laboratory at Scripps Florida, using the fruit fly, Drosophila, as the model organism. We were able to cut processing time from one week to a couple hours. Changing parameters is as simple as editing a spreadsheet; no programming knowledge is required. Furthermore, our automation approach is easy to extend to any image analysis workflow based on the software ImageJ.