Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A panel of cell lines of diverse molecular background offers an improved model system for high-content screening, comparative analysis, and cell systems biology. A computational pipeline has been developed to collect images from cell-based assays, segment individual cells and colonies, represent segmented objects in a multidimensional space, and cluster them for identifying distinct subpopulations. While each segmentation strategy can vary for different imaging assays, representation and subpopulation analysis share a common thread. Application of this pipeline to a library of 41 breast cancer cell lines is demonstrated. These cell lines are grown in 2D and imaged through immunofluorescence microscopy. Subpopulations in this panel are identified and shown to correlate with previous subtyping literature that was derived from transcript data.