| I have developed pipelines for the experimental acquisition and computational analysis of long-term high-resolution images of large populations of individual organisms. These workflows allow for the quantification of the dynamics of behavior in a statistically meaningful way. I first discuss an experimental apparatus I developed to obtain data of neuronal activity in freely behaving nematodes, then highlight the software that I wrote to analyze this data, and which I subsequently adapted for a different experimental setup for measuring calcium transients. I then review two alternative approaches to analyzing worm behavior. Next, I switch perspectives and detail my work to develop a novel approach to obtain multi-generational optical microscopy measurements of a selected set of single bacterial cells, adding the essential experimental and analytical components to construct an end-to-end pipeline from dynamic single-cell imaging experiments to automated image and data analysis. Finally, I present two manuscripts that utilized this system to garner novel theoretical insights into bacterial growth and division. |
