Relating Developmental Transcription Factors (TFs) Based on Fruitfly Embryoic Images

A fundamental problem in developmental systems biology is to understand driving forces behind organ formation. In this talk, we use 400+ high-throughput TF images from fruitfly embryoic stage 4-6 to relate these TFs in order to shed light into the TF cascades that trigger organ formation processes. We borrow sparse coding ideas from computational neuroscience/computer vision to decompose the images into principal patterns that capture the locations and shapes of  group TFs and compare with costly human annotations.

This is joint work with Siqi Wu, Erwin Frise, and Antony Joseph.