Mathematical modelling of muscle stem cell behaviour in ageing

Poster presented as part of the Crick BioImage Analysis Symposium 2023.

The premise of this project is that ageing drives aberrant cell behaviours when responding to stimuli. Zebrafish telomerase mutant (tert-/-) represents a genetic model of premature ageing due to DNA damage that can be used to probe the molecular basis for altered cell behaviour in ageing. We show from snapshots at different timepoints that muscle stem cells (muSCs) have a reduced capacity to respond to injury, showing deducted proliferation and fusion. To further characterise the behavioural change of muSCs after injury, we employed live imaging of muSCs during regeneration in tert-/-. Using migration as an example, we utilised manual counting, Celltracker and CelltrackR to quantitatively describe the behavioural discrepancy. However, extracting information about cell behaviour from 3D time-lapsed movies remains challenging. Ongoing goal is to adopt a model which can effectively characterise 4D migratory information in relation to the injury sites in tert-/. Our long-term goal is to identify a robust machine learning network for accurate classification of cell behaviour to enable high-throughput biomarker and drug screening in vivo.

Permission has been given by authors to upload to Crick Figshare. Copyright remains with the original authors.