The segmentation of microtubules in electron tomograms using Amira

Abstract

The development of automatic tools for the three-dimensional reconstruction of the microtubule cytoskeleton is crucial for large-scale analysis of mitotic spindles. Recently, we have published a method for the semiautomatic tracing of microtubules based on 3D template matching (Weber et al., J Struct Biol 178:129–138, 2012). Here, we give step-by-step instructions for the automatic tracing of microtubules emanating from centrosomes in the early mitotic Caenorhabditis elegans embryo. This approach, integrated in the visualization and data analysis software Amira, is applicable to tomographic data sets from other model systems.