Julio Pérez Márquez

Investigación/research
CellTarget

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CellTarget is a bioinformatic application with graphic user interfaces that carry out a variety of tasks for the analysis of the effects of drugs or biological molecules on populations of cells. It has been used in the analysis of neuronal cultures, although it can be also used in images from any biological material. Some applications of CellTarget include:

1-The program can be calibrated using the picture of a microscopic grid. Thus the user gets the real size of areas and lengths used in the applications.

2. CellTarget can be used to quantitatively analyze the neurite arborization of neurons. To do so, a series of concentric circles are drawn around the cell soma on the bases of the morphometric analysis made by Sholl (1953); the number of times a neurite intersects each circle is then counted.

3. The data analysis feature of CellTarget provides information of the average number of neurites that arise from the neuronal soma, the average neurite extension and includes the Branching Index calculation (A new mathematical function to evaluate neuronal morphology using the Sholl analysis. Luis Miguel García-Segura and Julio Perez-Marquez. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 226:103-109 (2014)).

4. CellTarget incorporates a Simple counter of selected details in one image; this feature was used to count apoptotic cells in images of cell cultures. The Grid Application is similar to the Simple counter, but overlaps a grid of lines to the image.

5. The Area application can be utilized to analyze similar areas in images of different magnification.



The CellTarget application was supported by grant BFU 2011-30217-C03-01. Ministerio de economía y competitividad. Secretaría de estado de Investigación, desarrollo, e innovación. Spain 2011.
© M-005735/2012