Statistically strong label-free quantitative identification of native fluorophores in a biological sample

Saabah B. Mahbub*, Martin Plöschner, Martin E. Gosnell, Ayad G. Anwer, Ewa M. Goldys

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

31 Citations (Scopus)
102 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Bioimaging using endogenous cell fluorescence, without any external biomarkers makes it possible to explore cells and tissues in their original native state, also in vivo. In order to be informative, this label-free method requires careful multispectral or hyperspectral recording of autofluorescence images followed by unsupervised extraction (unmixing) of biochemical signatures. The unmixing is difficult due to the scarcity of biochemically pure regions in cells and also because autofluorescence is weak compared with signals from labelled cells, typically leading to low signal to noise ratio. Here, we solve the problem of unsupervised hyperspectral unmixing of cellular autofluorescence by introducing the Robust Dependent Component Analysis (RoDECA). This approach provides sophisticated and statistically robust quantitative biochemical analysis of cellular autofluorescence images. We validate our method on artificial images, where the addition of varying known level of noise has allowed us to quantify the accuracy of our RoDECA analysis in a way that can be applied to real biological datasets. The same unsupervised statistical minimisation is then applied to imaging of mouse retinal photoreceptor cells where we establish the identity of key endogenous fluorophores (free NADH, FAD and lipofuscin) and derive the corresponding molecular abundance maps. The pre-processing methodology of image datasets is also presented, which is essential for the spectral unmixing analysis, but mostly overlooked in the previous studies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number15792
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalScientific Reports
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Nov 2017

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2017. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

Keywords

  • Data processing
  • Image processing

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