At a Crawl: Analysis of Cell Migration in IgorPro

In the lab we have been doing quite a bit of analysis of cell migration in 2D. Typically RPE1 cells migrating on fibronectin-coated glass. There are quite a few tools out there to track cell movements and to analyse their migration. Naturally, none of these did quite what we wanted and none fitted nicely into our analysis workflow. This meant writing something from scratch in IgorPro. You can access the code from my GitHub pages.

We’ve previously published a paper doing these kinds of analysis, but this code is all-new, faster and more efficient

The CellMigration repo contains an ipf that has three functions which will import tracks into Igor and analyse them. We use manual tracking in ImageJ/FIJI to obtain the co-ordinates for analysis, this is the only non-Igor part. I figured it was not worth porting this part too. Instructions are given in the repo and are hopefully self-explanatory. Here’s a screenshot of a typical experiment.

CMScreenShot

Acknowledgements: Colour palette is taken from the SRON stylesheet. The excellent igorutils (by yamad) gave me the idea for a structure and jtigor helped me with referencing StrConstants.

The post title is taken from the track “At a Crawl” by The Melvins from their Ozma LP