Skip to content Skip to navigation
University of Warwick
  • Study
  • |
  • Research
  • |
  • Business
  • |
  • Alumni
  • |
  • News
  • |
  • About

University of Warwick
Publications service & WRAP

Highlight your research

  • WRAP
    • Home
    • Search WRAP
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse WRAP by Year
    • Browse WRAP by Subject
    • Browse WRAP by Department
    • Browse WRAP by Funder
    • Browse Theses by Department
  • Publications Service
    • Home
    • Search Publications Service
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse Publications service by Year
    • Browse Publications service by Subject
    • Browse Publications service by Department
    • Browse Publications service by Funder
  • Help & Advice
University of Warwick

The Library

  • Login
  • Admin

Modelling shape fluctuations during cell migration

Tools
- Tools
+ Tools

Jefferyes, Samuel, D. R. (2014) Modelling shape fluctuations during cell migration. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

[img]
Preview
PDF
WRAP_THESIS_Jefferyes_2014.pdf - Submitted Version - Requires a PDF viewer.

Download (25Mb) | Preview
Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2812015~S1

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

Cell migration is of crucial importance for many physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing and immune response. Defects in cell migration are the cause of chronic in
ammatory diseases, mental retardation and cancer metastasis. Cell movement is driven by actin-mediated cell protrusion, substrate adhesion and contraction of the cell body.

The emergent behaviour of the intracellular processes described above is a change in the morphology of the cell. This inspires the main hypothesis of this work which is that there is a measurable relationship between cell morphology dynamics and migratory behaviour, and that quantitative models of this relationship can create useful tools for investigating the mechanisms by which a cell regulates its own motility.

Here we analyse cell shapes of migrating human retinal pigment epithelial cells with the aim to map cell shape changes to cellular behaviour. We develop a non-linear model for learning the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of cell shape space and use the resultant shape representation to analyse quantitative relationships between shape and migration behaviour. The biggest algorithmic challenge overcome in this thesis was developing a method for efficiently and appropriately measuring the shape difference between pairs of cells that may have come from independent image scenes. This difference measure must be capable of coping with the widely varying morphologies exhibited by migrating epithelial cells. We present a new, rapid, landmark-free, shape difference measure called the Best Alignment Metric (BAM). We show that BAM performs highly within our framework, generating a shape space representation of a very large dataset without any prior information on the importance of any given shape feature.

We demonstrate quantitative evidence for a model of cell turning based on repolarisation and discuss the impact our proposed framework could have on the continued study of migratory mechanisms.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Subjects: Q Science > QR Microbiology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): Cell migration, Cells -- Morphology
Official Date: September 2014
Dates:
DateEvent
September 2014Submitted
Institution: University of Warwick
Theses Department: Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre
Thesis Type: PhD
Publication Status: Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: Straube, Anne ; Rajpoot, Nasir M. (Nasir Mahmood)
Sponsors: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Great Britain)
Extent: x, 104 leaves : illustrations (colour)
Language: eng

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics

twitter

Email us: wrap@warwick.ac.uk
Contact Details
About Us