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bioRxiv
BIORXIV
bioRxiv
2692-8205
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

10.1101/2024.08.16.608298
preprint
1
Article
An Image Processing Tool for Automated Quantification of Bacterial Burdens in Zebrafish Larvae
Yamaguchi Naoya http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0573-695X

Otsuna Hideo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2107-8881

Eisenberg-Bord Michal http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2043-0502

Ramakrishnan Lalita http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0692-5533

19 8 2024
2024.08.16.608298https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2024.08.16.608298
nihpp-2024.08.16.608298.pdf
Zebrafish larvae are used to model the pathogenesis of multiple bacteria. This transparent model offers the unique advantage of allowing quantification of fluorescent bacterial burdens (fluorescent pixel counts: FPC) in vivo by facile microscopical methods, replacing enumeration of bacteria using time-intensive plating of lysates on bacteriological media. Accurate FPC measurements require laborious manual image processing to mark the outside borders of the animals so as to delineate the bacteria inside the animals from those in the culture medium that they are in. Here, we have developed an automated ImageJ/Fiji-based macro that accurately detect the outside borders of Mycobacterium marinum-infected larvae.
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pmc
