Morphological Analysis of Leaf Epidermis Pavement Cells with PaCeQuant

Abstract

Morphological analysis of cell shapes requires segmentation of cell contours from input images and subsequent extraction of meaningful shape descriptors that provide the basis for qualitative and quantitative assessment of shape characteristics. Here, we describe the publicly available ImageJ plugin PaCeQuant and its associated R package PaCeQuantAna, which provides a pipeline for fully automatic segmentation, feature extraction, statistical analysis, and graphical visualization of cell shape properties. PaCeQuant is specifically well suited for analysis of jigsaw puzzle-like leaf epidermis pavement cells from 2D input images and supports the quantification of global, contour-based, skeleton-based, and pavement cell-specific shape descriptors.

Keywords: Confocal laser scanning microscopy; Epidermis; ImageJ/Fiji; Leaf morphogenesis; PaCeQuant; Pavement cell shape; R software.