PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pablo Vicente-Munuera
AU  - Pedro Gómez-Gálvez
AU  - Robert J. Tetley
AU  - Cristina Forja
AU  - Antonio Tagua
AU  - Marta Letrán
AU  - Melda Tozluoglu
AU  - Yanlan Mao
AU  - Luis M. Escudero
TI  - EpiGraph: an open-source platform to quantify epithelial organization
AID  - 10.1101/217521
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 217521
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/05/217521.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/05/217521.full
AB  - During development, cells must coordinate their differentiation with their growth and organization to form complex multicellular structures such as tissues and organs. Healthy tissues must maintain these structures during homeostasis. Epithelia are packed ensembles of cells from which the different tissues of the organism will originate during embryogenesis. A large barrier to the analysis of the morphogenetic changes in epithelia is the lack of simple tools that enable the quantification of cell arrangements. Here we present EpiGraph, an image analysis tool that quantifies epithelial organization. Our method combines computational geometry and graph theory to measure the degree of order of any packed tissue. EpiGraph goes beyond the traditional polygon distribution analysis, capturing other organizational traits that improve the characterization of epithelia. EpiGraph can objectively compare the rearrangements of epithelial cells during development and homeostasis to quantify how the global ensemble is affected. Importantly, it has been implemented in the open-access platform FIJI. This makes EpiGraph very user friendly, with no programming skills required.