QuimP – Analyzing transmembrane signalling in highly deformable cells

Summary Transmembrane signalling plays important physiological roles, with G protein–coupled cell surface receptors being particularly important therapeutic targets. Fluorescent proteins are widely used to study signalling, but the analysis of image time series can be challenging, in particular when changes in cell shape are involved. To this end we have developed QuimP software. QuimP semi-automatically tracks cell outlines, quantifies spatio-temporal patterns of fluorescence at the cell membrane, and tracks local shape deformations. QuimP is particularly useful for studying cell motility, for example in immune or cancer cells. Availability and Implementation QuimP ( http://warwick.ac.uk/quimp ) consists of a set of Java plugins for Fiji/ImageJ ( http://fiji.sc/ ) and can be easily installed through the Fiji Updater ( http://warwick.ac.uk/quimp/wiki-pages/installation ). It is compatible with Mac, Windows and Unix-based operating systems, requiring version >1.45 of Fiji/ImageJ and Java 8. QuimP is released as open source ( https://github.com/CellDynamics/QuimP/ ) under an academic licence. Contact [email protected] Supplementary Information Supplementary materials (SI-A to SI-D) are available at Bioinformatics online. Test data is available from http://warwick.ac.uk/quimp/test_data .