Infering an ontology of single cell motions from high-throughput microscopy data

Cellular motility is a fundamental biological process. Progress in the fields of gene silencing and high-throughput (HT) microscopy provide us with the tools to study its molecular basis and potential perturbators. The primary contribution of this paper is to present MotIW, a generic workflow for single cell motility study in HT time-lapse screening data. We successfully apply it to a simulated screen, as well as a genome-wide screen. Furthermore, MotIW enables the identification of eigth motility patterns into which all trajectories from this dataset divide up into, without any prior model of cell motion.