Segmenting telomeres and chromosomes in cells

The very end of every chromosome is a region called the telomere. Telomeres are nucleo-protein complexes containing specific DNA repeat sequences whose lengths are strongly believed to give indications to aging and tumor progression. In order to study the role these repeat sequences play in the cell, we developed a fluorescence microscopy imaging system and associated image analysis methods to accurately measure these telomere lengths. To visualize the image of the tiny telomeres, we captured 2 spectrally different images of the same cell. One image contains only telomeres and the other contains only chromosomes. We next apply successful and novel methods to segment the telomere and chromosome images and then to link each chromosome with its telomeres. Our system is so far the only existing system available for this purpose and has already been in use in many research laboratories in Western Europe, North America, and Hong Kong.