Application of image analysis to plant cell suspension cultures

Cell suspension culture is a promising tool for developing high-efficiency systems for transplant or metabolite production. To make the best use of this technique, it is essential to maintain high quality in cultured cells. Quality evaluations, which select cultured cells or cell lines with desirable properties, are necessary for cell quality maintenance. Image analysis has good potential for realizing simple, non-invasive and objective quality evaluations in cell suspension cultures. Factors used so far to evaluate cultured cells relate to color, growth rate, shape, aggregate size distribution, and macroscopic texture. Both microscopic and macroscopic images are available for analysis. Microscopic image analysis has advantages over directly observing individual cells, cell aggregates or differentiated cell masses. However, it has problems with image acquisition. On the other hand, macroscopic images viewed with normal or macro lenses whose fields of view cover almost one whole culture have an advantage in imaging, as images can be acquired from outside the culture vessel without special devices. They have also been used for quality evaluation of cell suspensions using cell quantification or texture analysis.