Biophysical informatics reveals distinctive phenotypic signatures and functional diversity of single-cell lineages

Trevor J Chan, Xingjian Zhang, Michael Mak

In this work, we present an analytical method for quantifying both single-cell morphologies and cell network topologies of tumor cell populations and use it to predict 3D cell behavior. We utilized a supervised deep learning approach to perform instance segmentation on label-free live cell images across a wide range of cell densities. We measured cell shape properties and characterized network topologies for 136 single-cell clones derived from the YUMM1.7 and YUMMER1.7 mouse melanoma cell lines. Using an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we identified six distinct morphological subclasses. We further observed differences in tumor growth and invasion dynamics across subclasses in an in vitro 3D spheroid model. Compared to existing methods for quantifying 2D or 3D phenotype, our analytical method requires less time, needs no specialized equipment and is capable of much higher throughput, making it ideal for applications such as high-throughput drug screening and clinical diagnosis.

This research is published in "Bioinformatics" and can be viewed at: [Article]. Code for this project is available at: [Github].