Andreas P. Cuny


Last Name

Cuny

First Name

Andreas P.

ORCID

0000-0001-9640-4154

Organisational unit

03699 - Stelling, Jörg / Stelling, Jörg

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20223
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • Live cell microscopy: From image to insight
    Item type: Review Article
    Cuny, Andreas P.; Schlottmann, Fabian P.; Ewald, Jennifer C.; et al. (2022)
    Biophysics Reviews
    Live-cell microscopy is a powerful tool that can reveal cellular behavior as well as the underlying molecular processes. A key advantage of microscopy is that by visualizing biological processes, it can provide direct insights. Nevertheless, live-cell imaging can be technically challenging and prone to artifacts. For a successful experiment, many careful decisions are required at all steps from hardware selection to downstream image analysis. Facing these questions can be particularly intimidating due to the requirement for expertise in multiple disciplines, ranging from optics, biophysics, and programming to cell biology. In this review, we aim to summarize the key points that need to be considered when setting up and analyzing a live-cell imaging experiment. While we put a particular focus on yeast, many of the concepts discussed are applicable also to other organisms. In addition, we discuss reporting and data sharing strategies that we think are critical to improve reproducibility in the field.
  • High-resolution mass measurements of single budding yeast reveal linear growth segments
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cuny, Andreas P.; Sapra, K. Tanuj; Martínez-Martín, David; et al. (2022)
    Nature Communications
    The regulation of cell growth has fundamental physiological, biotechnological and medical implications. However, methods that can continuously monitor individual cells at sufficient mass and time resolution hardly exist. Particularly, detecting the mass of individual microbial cells, which are much smaller than mammalian cells, remains challenging. Here, we modify a previously described cell balance (‘picobalance’) to monitor the proliferation of single cells of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, under culture conditions in real time. Combined with optical microscopy to monitor the yeast morphology and cell cycle phase, the picobalance approaches a total mass resolution of 0.45 pg. Our results show that single budding yeast cells (S/G2/M phase) increase total mass in multiple linear segments sequentially, switching their growth rates. The growth rates weakly correlate with the cell mass of the growth segments, and the duration of each growth segment correlates negatively with cell mass. We envision that our technology will be useful for direct, accurate monitoring of the growth of single cells throughout their cycle.
  • Cell region fingerprints enable highly precise single-cell tracking and lineage reconstruction
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cuny, Andreas P.; Ponti, Aaron; Kündig, Tomas; et al. (2022)
    Nature Methods
    Experimental studies of cell growth, inheritance and their associated processes by microscopy require accurate single-cell observations of sufficient duration to reconstruct the genealogy. However, cell tracking-assigning identical cells on consecutive images to a track-is often challenging, resulting in laborious manual verification. Here, we propose fingerprints to identify problematic assignments rapidly. A fingerprint distance compares the structural information contained in the low frequencies of a Fourier transform to measure the similarity between cells in two consecutive images. We show that fingerprints are broadly applicable across cell types and image modalities, provided the image has sufficient structural information. Our tracker (Trac(X)) uses fingerprints to reject unlikely assignments, thereby increasing tracking performance on published and newly generated long-term data sets. For Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we propose a comprehensive model for cell size control at the single-cell and population level centered on the Whi5 regulator, demonstrating how precise tracking can help uncover previously undescribed single-cell biology.
Publications 1 - 3 of 3