QuimP: analyzing transmembrane signalling in highly deformable cells

SUMMARY: Transmembrane signalling plays important physiological roles, with G protein-coupled cell surface receptors being particularly important therapeutic targets. Fluorescent proteins are widely used to study signalling, but analyses of image time series can be challenging, in particular when cells change shape. QuimP software semi-automatically tracks spatio-temporal patterns of fluorescence at the cell membrane at high spatial resolution. This makes it a unique tool for studying transmembrane signalling, particularly during cell migration in immune or cancer cells for example. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: QuimP (http://warwick.ac.uk/quimp) is a set of Java plugins for Fiji/ImageJ (http://fiji.sc) installable through the Fiji Updater (http://warwick.ac.uk/quimp/wiki-pages/installation). It is compatible with Mac, Windows and Unix operating systems, requiring version >1.45 of ImageJ and Java 8. QuimP is released as open source (https://github.com/CellDynamics/QuimP) under an academic licence. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.