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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.07.23.550217

CuticleTrace: A toolkit for capturing cell outlines of leaf cuticle with implications for paleoecology and paleoclimatology

Lloyd, B. A.·Barclay, R. S.·Dunn, R. E.·Currano, E. D.·Mohamaad, A. I.·Skersies, K.·Punyasena, S. W.
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Abstract

PremiseLeaf epidermal cell morphology is closely tied to plants evolutionary histories and growth environments, and is therefore of interest to many plant biologists. However, cell measurement can be time-consuming and restrictive with current methods. CuticleTrace is a suite of FIJI and R-based functions that streamlines and automates the segmentation and measurement of epidermal pavement cells across a wide range of cell morphologies and image qualities. Methods and ResultsWe evaluated CuticleTrace-generated measurements against those from alternate automated methods and expert and undergraduate hand-tracings across a taxonomically diverse 50-image dataset of variable image qualities. We observed [~]93% statistical agreement between CuticleTrace and expert hand-traced measurements, outperforming alternate methods. ConclusionsCuticleTrace is broadly applicable, modular, and customizable, and integrates data visualization and cell shape measurement with image segmentation, lowering the barrier to high-throughput studies of epidermal morphology by vastly decreasing the labor investment required to generate high-quality cell shape datasets.

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Lloyd, B. A., Barclay, R. S., Dunn, R. E., Currano, E. D., Mohamaad, A. I., Skersies, K., Punyasena, S. W.. 2023-07-25. CuticleTrace: A toolkit for capturing cell outlines of leaf cuticle with implications for paleoecology and paleoclimatology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.23.550217

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