Quantitative evaluation of cytoskeletal organizations by microscopic image analysis

Visualization of cytoskeletal organizations is a fundamental research method for understanding plant cell activities. Conventionally, immunostaining methods have been used to visualize cytoskeletons, but some technical difficulties make it hard to obtain a large number of reliable microscopic images. The introduction of fluorescent protein tagging technology and the development of high-throughput method for microscopic image acquisition have made it easier and quicker to obtain many reliable microscopic digital images of cytoskeletons. Based on these technical improvements, a method for quantitative evaluation of cytoskeletal organizations by image analysis has been developed. This method has become an indispensable research approach in state-of-the-art plant cell biology. In this minireview, I outline a practical method to measure image features to quantitatively evaluate the orientation, parallelness, bundling, and density of cytoskeletons using the ImageJ image analysis software.