Mitotic phase based detection of chromosome segregation errors in embryonic stem cells

The detection of chromosome segregation errors in mitosis is an important area of biological research. Due to the rarity and subtle nature of such errors in untreated cell lines, there is a need for automated, high-throughput systems for quantifying the rates at which such defects occur. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting subtle chromosome segregation errors in mitosis in embryonic stem cells, targeting two cases: misaligned chromosomes in a metaphase cell, and lagging chromosomes between anaphase cells. Our method builds on existing approaches for analysis of other cell lines (e.g. HeLa) which label mitotic phases through mitosis and detect substantial deviations from normal mitotic progression. We apply these to more challenging, denser, stem cell lines. Leveraging the mitotic phase labelling allows us to detect smaller, more subtle defects within mitosis. This results in a very high recall rate, as necessary for detection of such rare events.