Welcome to 'Etch A Cell - VR'!

 

In this Etch A Cell project we're working with friends!

'Etch A Cell - VR' is a collaboration between the Etch A Cell team at the Francis Crick Institute (London), the University of New South Wales (Sydney), the University of Queensland (Brisbane), Monash University (Melbourne) and the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway.
 

What are we studying in this project and why?

We're running 'Etch A Cell - VR' to analyse images of a cancer cell. With your help, this project will generate data that will be used to help improve understanding of cell biology. One of the approaches we will use to look at the data produced will be to create a virtual reality (VR) experience. In this experience it will be possible to ‘walk around’ on the surface of the cell and then move inside to explore the inside of the cell, like you can see in this video produced by some of our team members in Australia.

 

Looking at things from a different perspective - why virtual reality is useful to scientists

Virtual reality (VR) provides another way for scientists to make sense of complex data. It's a particularly useful way to study visually rich three dimensional data, like the data we produce in Etch A Cell. Through looking at this data in VR it can be possible to gain new understanding through literally taking a different perspective!

 

How you can help – colour in cells for science!

This work involves using powerful new electron microscopes to capture thousands of images of cancer cells. The next step in the process of making a virtual reality experience is where we need your help. We must analyse the images from the electron microscope and segment the features we’re interested in, which means to draw around the bits of the cell that we want to study. We can then convert these segmentation into objects that can be represented in 3D by the animation experts in Sydney. The next step is making those objects into a representation of the entire cell, with the major structures inside the cell, called organelles, and the entire cell surface (or plasma membrane) surrounding the cell.
 

Why do we need your help?

The process of manual segmentation can take a really long time - it is the major bottleneck in our research - this is why we need your help! While it may look as though computers would be able to perform this process very well already, in practice they are still quite error-prone and the time it takes to perfect the algorithm can be longer than the time to do the segmentations by hand. Small variations in the images, either due to real biological differences or due to slightly different imaging conditions, often render a finely-tuned algorithm ineffective for other data, sometimes meaning that the algorithms need to be optimised for each and every sample!

We hope that this project will advance our ability to analyse biological features 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!
 

This project is part of the Etch A Cell Organisation

'Etch A Cell - VR' is one of multiple projects produced by the Etch A Cell team and their collaborators to explore different aspects of cell biology. If you'd like to get involved in some of our other projects, you can find the other Etch A Cell projects on our organisation page here.

The science team behind Etch A Cell are based at the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK. There they work with many other researchers to study different aspects of biology using cutting-edge Electron Microscopes. These microscopes have a very high magnification and resolution, and so can be used to take highly-detailed images of many things, including cells, molecules and tissues. These images can be used to provide us with a richer understanding of biology, which can help us understand the biological changes associated with health and disease.

Recent developments in electron microscopy mean it is possible to collect images automatically, so our team is now producing a huge amount data; looking at a single cell alone can produce several terabytes worth! Although these technological advances mean we can perform our research much faster, this flood of data has caused a data analysis bottleneck, which is why we need your help!
 

With thanks to support from...