Extracting and Integrating Protein Localization Changes from Multiple Image Screens of Yeast Cells

Alex X Lu; Louis-Francois Handfield; Alan M Moses

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.3022

Extracting and Integrating Protein Localization Changes from Multiple Image Screens of Yeast Cells

Bio Protoc. 2018 Sep 20;8(18):e3022. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3022.

Authors

Alex X Lu¹, Louis-Francois Handfield¹, Alan M Moses^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
² Department of Cells and System Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
³ Center for Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

Abstract

The evaluation of protein localization changes in cells under diverse chemical and genetic perturbations is now possible due to the increasing quantity of screens that systematically image thousands of proteins in an organism. Integrating information from different screens provides valuable contextual information about the protein function. For example, proteins that change localization in response to many different stressful environmental perturbations may have different roles than those that only change in response to a few. We developed, to our knowledge, the first protocol that permits the quantitative comparison and clustering of protein localization changes across multiple screens. Our analysis allows for the exploratory analysis of proteins according to their pattern of localization changes across many different perturbations, potentially discovering new roles by association.

Keywords: Cell biology; Cluster analysis; Computational biology; Image analysis; Protein localization; Proteomics; Unsupervised machine learning.