by Shuichi Onami

From: RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center
Hosted by: Fumio Motegi & Sasha Bershadsky

Quantitative data on spatiotemporal dynamics of embryo provide crucial information for understanding the mechanism of development. Combinations of live imaging and computational image-processing technologies have produced a large amount and a wide variety of quantitative dynamics data on embryogenesis. In this seminar, I will introduce our large collection of quantitative data on nuclear division dynamics in early C. elegans embryos. These data were obtained by combining four-dimensional microscopy and computational image processing under gene perturbations of each of all essential embryonic genes. We developed a method to elucidate the sequence of phenotype expression by computing correlations between phenotypic characters. We also developed a method to infer genes involved in the phenotype expression network by computing outliers in the correlations. I would like to discuss how quantitative dynamics data provide new opportunities in biology. I would also like to introduce our SSBD database (http://ssbd.qbic.riken.jp) for storing and sharing quantitative biological dynamics data. This database is developed and maintained as a part of the Life Science Database Integration Project in Japan to sustainably store and share quantitative biological dynamics data that are created by the Japanese science community and beyond.