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Help us study one of the biggest structures found in your cells - the Endoplasmic Reticulum
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Nobody has studied these cell processes in such depth before - we really need your help to analyse our huge amounts of data
Etch A Cell - ERAbout Etch A Cell - ER
In Etch A Cell - ER we need you to help us study the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) of a cell. The ER is often one of the biggest structures (organelles) in the cell, and is involved in lots of important cellular processes including the production and transport of new proteins.
In this project we need your help to study images of cells that were produced using an Electron Microscope. These microscopes use an electron beam to produce images of molecules, cells and tissues at a very high level of magnification. An important step in studying these images is called “segmentation”; this is where someone draws around structures of interest in the image, like you may have done in our other Etch A Cell projects to study the nuclear envelope or mitochondria.
We hope that these projects will advance our ability to analyse biological structures using electron microscopy and segmentation. With enough volunteer help we may be able to train computers to segment automatically. This has huge potential to help us understand biology and study disease!