MEASURING CELL-CELL INTERACTIONS

In the simple schematic example shown to the right, a cytoplasmic protein depicted in green forms cytoplasmic puncta (top panel) upon treatment.

Formation of cell-cell junctions that contain this protein of interest (bottom panel) can be measured using a variety of image analysis strategies. One simple approach is to measure the incidence of brightly-staining structures with an elongated shape.

This very simplistic example can be extended to measure the accumulation of 4-5 different proteins (each detected via specific antibodies labeled with different color fluorescent tags) within cell-cell junctions.