Approach for numerically describing and classifying benthic animals’ polymorphic cells morphology
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Cell Biology, Computational Biology, Marine Biology, Mathematical Biology
- Keywords
- Callista brevisiphonata, Aphelasterias japonica, morphometry, Patiria pectinifera, hemocyte, coelomocyte, benthic animals, immune system
- Copyright
- © 2018 Karetin et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Approach for numerically describing and classifying benthic animals’ polymorphic cells morphology. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27271v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27271v1
Abstract
Describing cell morphology is a tricky task, prone to misinterpretation due to subjective nature of the human observer and his vocabulary limitations. Consequently, these limitations actuate prevalence of non-formalized, statistically unverifiable language use. This determines the reason for overlooking cell shape as a viable parameter for describing cell's functional state intricacies. In this study we demonstrate the use of mathematical parameters set for describing two-dimensional fractals, such as: convex hull, density, roundness and asymmetry, for comparative in vitro morphological analysis of sprawled starfishes' Aphelasterias japonica and Patiria pectinifera (Echinodermata: Asteroidea) coelomocytes, and bivalve's Callista brevisiphonata (Mollusca: Bivalvia) hemocytes. We found that these parameters allow us to describe visually distinguishable but verbally indescribable "chaotic" sprawled cell shapes. Furthermore, resulting numerical cell descriptions differs significantly, enabling for their species-specific grouping and classification. We argue that presented morphometric methodology can be used for describing and classifying cells of any arbitrary morphology, as well as compiling "cell shape - cell functional state" match library for later use in in vitro analysis, potentially for cells of any animal.
Author Comment
Presented here are results of practical application of our proposed method for numerical description of cell morphology. Here, we used our methodology, which is based on calculating a variety of linear and quasi-fractal parameters of two-dimensional cell shapes, to describe hemocytes morphology of few benthic animal species. We demonstrated that proposed method groups otherwise visually poorly distinguishable hemocytes of different animal species into separate species-specific clusters. Furthermore, it produces several cell groups inside species-specific clusters. This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.