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)

Marta K.,Jung,Sang-Kyu,Aleman-Meza,Boanerges,Liu,Zheng,Z Labocha (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 foraccurate quantification of sex ratio in Caenorhabditis elegans. The software functionsinclude, 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 newtraining images to optimize the software for different imaging conditions. We evaluated theperformance of our software by comparing manual and automated assessment of sex ratio.Our data showed that the WormGender software provided overall accurate sex ratio measurements. We further demonstrated the usage of WormGender by quantifying the highincidence of male (him) phenotype in 27 mutant strains. Mutants of nine genes (brc-1,C30G12.6, 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 Windowsand Mac platforms. The source code is freely available together with a user manual andsample data at http://www.QuantWorm.org/. The source code and sample data are alsoavailable at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1541248.

Additional Information

Publication

Other

Language: English

Date: 2015

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