PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Weikang Wang AU - Diana Douglas AU - Jingyu Zhang AU - Yi-Jiun Chen AU - Ya-Yun Cheng AU - Sangeeta Kumari AU - Metewo Selase Enuameh AU - Yan Dai AU - Callen T. Wallace AU - Simon C. Watkins AU - Weiguo Shu AU - Jianhua Xing TI - Live cell imaging and analysis reveal cell phenotypic transition dynamics inherently missing in snapshot data AID - 10.1101/2019.12.12.874248 DP - 2020 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2019.12.12.874248 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/27/2019.12.12.874248.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/27/2019.12.12.874248.full AB - Recent advances in single-cell techniques catalyze an emerging field of studying how cells convert from one phenotype to another, in a step-by-step process. Two grand technical challenges, however, impede further development of the field. Fixed cell-based approaches can provide genome-wide snapshots of cell status but have fundamental limits on revealing temporal information, and fluorescence-based live cell imaging approaches provide temporal information but are technically challenging for multiplex long-term imaging. We first developed a live-cell imaging platform that tracks cellular status change through combining endogenous fluorescent labeling that minimizes perturbation to cell physiology, and/or live cell imaging of high-dimensional cell morphological and texture features. With our platform and an A549 VIM-RFP EMT reporter line, live cell trajectories reveal parallel paths of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition missing from snapshot data due to cell-cell heterogeneity. Our results emphasize the necessity of extracting dynamical information of phenotypic transitions from multiplex live cell imaging.