pycellin 0.3.5b3

Graph-based framework to manipulate and analyze cell lineages from cell tracking data

Pycellin

Pycellin is a graph-based Python framework to easily manipulate and extract information from cell tracking data, at the single-cell level. In Pycellin, cell lineages are modeled intuitively by directed acyclic graphs (DAG). Graph nodes represent cells at a specific point in time and space, and graph edges represent the time and space displacement of the cells. Please note that while Pycellin is built to support cell division events, it does not authorize cell merging events: a cell at a specific timepoint cannot have more than one parent.

Pycellin provides predefined features related to cell morphology, cell motion and tracking that can be automatically added to enrich lineages. More predefined features will be implemented in the future. The framework also facilitates the creation of new features defined by the user to accommodate the wide variety of experiments and biological questions.

Pycellin can read from and write to TrackMate XML and Cell Tracking Challenge text file formats. More tracking formats will progressively be supported.

While Pycellin has been designed with bacteria / cell lineages in mind, it could be used with more diverse tracking data provided the few conditions below are enforced:

• the tracking data can be modeled by a DAG, meaning no merging event
• time must flow homogeneously, i.e. all the edges of a lineage graph must represent the same elapsed time.

Installation

Pycellin supports Python 3.10 and above. It is tested with Python 3.10 and 3.13 on the latest versions of Ubuntu, Windows and MacOS. Please let me know if you encounter any compatibility issue with a different combination.

You can install Pycellin from PyPI:

pip install pycellin

To install Pycellin with the optional test related dependencies:

pip install pycellin[test]

Code Example

import pycellin

# Import data from an external tool, here TrackMate.
xml_path = "sample_data/Ecoli_growth_on_agar_pad.xml"
model = pycellin.load_TrackMate_XML(xml_path)

# Plot the cell lineages.
for lin in model.get_cell_lineages():
    plot(lin)

# Compute and plot the cell cycle lineages.
model.add_cycle_data()
for clin in model.get_cycle_lineages():
    plot(clin)

# Enrich your lineages with additional predefined features.
model.add_pycellin_features([
    "cell_length", 
    "cell_width",
    "cell_displacement", 
    "cell_speed", 
    "branch_mean_speed",
    "relative_age",
    "division_time", 
    "division_rate",
    "cell_cycle_completeness",
    ])
model.update()

# Export the enriched data as dataframes.
cell_df = model.to_cell_dataframe()
link_df = model.to_link_dataframe()
cycle_df = model.to_cycle_dataframe()
lineage_df = model.to_lineage_dataframe()

Usage

Please note that the following notebooks are still a work in progress. There may be some mistakes in the code and some sections might move from one notebook to another.

Notebook	Description	Level	State
Getting started	The basics of Pycellin, through examples	Beginner	WIP
Managing features	How to add, compute and remove features from a model	Beginner	WIP
Working with TrackMate data	How Pycellin can work with TrackMate, through an example	Beginner	WIP
Creating a model from scratch	How to manually create a Pycellin model, including its lineages	Advanced	Stub
Custom features	How to create user-defined features and augment a model with them	Advanced	WIP

Credits

• NetworkX for lineages modeling (Hagberg, Schult and Swart, 2008)
• TrackMate for the TrackMate data loader and exporter (Tinevez et al., 2017, Ershov et al., 2022)
• The Cell Tracking Challenge for the CTC data loader and exporter (Maška et al., 2023)