Measuring length of sperm cells of fruit flies
Mollie Manier
Background
• The longest sperm ever recorded comes from the fruit fly Drosophila
bifurca, which is a total of 5.8 cm long
• 20 times longer than the fly itself.
• Females after mating store these giant sperm within an even longer sperm storage organ, which is 8 cm long
Background
• Dr. Manier’s research studies the genetic basis of sperm length in males and sperm storage organ length in females
• Knock out individual genes and look at their effect on sperm length or sperm storage organ length
• Statistically longer, or shorter?
Problem
• Measure the length of sperms from images
(easier cases)
Problem
• Measure the length of sperms from images
(hardercases)
Tasks
• An interactive tool for cell length measurement
• A GUI interface (or a plug‐in to ImageJ)
• Input: image
• Output: cell length
• Allows moderate user interaction
• Examples: draw region‐of‐interest; click on two/multiple points on the cell; rough sketch over the cell; etc.
• In harder cases, more interaction is ok
• Robust
• Passes all easy examples and most hard examples