Gleeful Look

Glial cells are like an unsung network of city support workers – regulating traffic, sweeping streets, keeping things orderly and hygienic in our brain and nervous system. Their shape is key to how they interact with brain cells, but current techniques to assess this morphology are limited. A new imaging tool, GliaMorph, combines different modules to in turn quantify texture, segmentation, and other features at the individual cell and global scale. Researchers turned GliaMorph’s focus to zebrafish Müller glia – cells important to eye health. They were able to measure Müller glia development, observing the growing complexity and rearrangement (pictured, at 72 - top - and 120 - bottom - hours post fertilisation) – with the original image on the left followed left to right by segmentation, structural edges, distance between elements, and the cellular skeleton highlighted. They then measured changing protein positioning in a mouse model of glaucoma, showing the approach’s direct potential for revealing the precise morphology of human disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Elisabeth Kugler and colleagues
• Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, London, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Development, February 2023