Working Smarter, Not Harder
Friday, April 15th, 2011
Anna’s got a problem. She’s a biology student at Keene State College working on original research and she needs to count the stem cells. Specifically she needs to count somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 stem cells at once, in a bucket full of slides. That’s a lot of counting. More to the point, it’s taking hours of her time, which is pulling her away from some of the research work she could be doing. Essentially what she needs is a way to count dots. Little green dots.
Lucky for Anna her instructor, Dr. Jason Pellettieri is looking out for her. Dr. Pellettieri introduced her to ImageJ, a platform agnostic piece of image manipulation and analysis software. By installing a free plug-in called the Automatic Nuclei Counter (you can find the plug in on the website for the Center for Bio-Image Informatics), Anna is now able to use the software to do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to counting fluorescing cells, and measuring the suface area of her specimens.
Counting Cells
Measuring Surface Area
This is great news for Anna, but more than that, this is great news for all of the Biology department. This simple technique has the potential to free research students from the laboriously counting and clicking away, so instead they can focus on running experiments.
