来自Nature methods 最新的报道，美国霍华德·休斯医学研究所的研究人员描绘了线虫胚胎后期L1期的三维数字图像，同时发明了一种自动分离细胞核的方法，同时对其进行了注释。这对于线虫细胞核空间结构的定量分析以及高通量分析其单个细胞而言，具有重要意义。

研究者就确定的357个核样本展开了自动分析，准确性高达86%。新方法主要运用于高通量单个细胞的分析，比如说基因表达分析等。

原文出处：

Nature Methods 6, 667 - 672 (2009)  doi:10.1038/nmeth.1366

A 3D digital atlas of C. elegans and its application to single-cell analyses
Fuhui Long^1,3, Hanchuan Peng^1,3, Xiao Liu², Stuart K Kim² & Eugene Myers²

1 Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
2 Department of Developmental Biology, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California, USA.
3 These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract
We built a digital nuclear atlas of the newly hatched, first larval stage (L1) of the wild-type hermaphrodite of Caenorhabditis elegans at single-cell resolution from confocal image stacks of 15 individual worms. The atlas quantifies the stereotypy of nuclear locations and provides other statistics on the spatial patterns of the 357 nuclei that could be faithfully segmented and annotated out of the 558 present at this developmental stage. We then developed an automated approach to assign cell names to each nucleus in a three-dimensional image of an L1 worm. We achieved 86% accuracy in identifying the 357 nuclei automatically. This computational method will allow high-throughput single-cell analyses of the post-embryonic worm, such as gene expression analysis, or ablation or stimulation of cells under computer control in a high-throughput functional screen.