WormGender – Open-Source Software for Automatic Caenorhabditis elegans Sex Ratio Measurement

ECU Author/Contributor (non-ECU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Boanerges Aleman-Meza (Creator)

Sang-Kyu Jung (Creator)

Marta K. Labocha (Creator)

Zheng Liu (Creator)

Weiwei Zhong (Creator)

Institution

East Carolina University (ECU )

Web Site: http://www.ecu.edu/lib/

Abstract: Fast and quantitative analysis of animal phenotypes is one of the major challenges of current biology. Here we report the WormGender open-source software, which is designed for\r\naccurate quantification of sex ratio in Caenorhabditis elegans. The software functions\r\ninclude, i) automatic recognition and counting of adult hermaphrodites and males, ii) a manual inspection feature that enables manual correction of errors, and iii) flexibility to use new\r\ntraining images to optimize the software for different imaging conditions. We evaluated the\r\nperformance of our software by comparing manual and automated assessment of sex ratio.\r\nOur data showed that the WormGender software provided overall accurate sex ratio measurements. We further demonstrated the usage of WormGender by quantifying the high\r\nincidence of male (him) phenotype in 27 mutant strains. Mutants of nine genes (brc-1,\r\nC30G12.6, cep-1, coh-3, him-3, him-5, him-8, skr-1, unc-86) showed significant him phenotype. The WormGender is written in Java and can be installed and run on both Windows\r\nand Mac platforms. The source code is freely available together with a user manual and\r\nsample data at http://www.QuantWorm.org/. The source code and sample data are also\r\navailable at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1541248.

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Other

Language: English

Date: 2023

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