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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Live Confocal Imaging of Developing Arabidopsis Flowers
Published on: April 1, 2017
Segmenting the sepal and shoot apical meristem of Arabidopsis thaliana
Alexandre L Cunha1, Adrienne H K Roeder, Elliot M Meyerowitz
1Center for Advanced Computing Research, Pasadena, California 91125, USA. cunha@caltech.edu
Abstract:
We present methods for segmenting the sepal and shoot apical meristem of the Arabidopsis thaliana plant. We propose a mathematical morphology pipeline and a modified numerical scheme for the active contours without edges algorithm to extract the geometry and topology of plant cells imaged using confocal laser scanning microscopy. We demonstrate our methods in typical images used in the studies of cell endoreduplication and hormone transport and show that in practice they produce highly accurate results requiring little human intervention to cope with image aberrations.

