Automated analysis of filamentous microbial morphology with AnaMorf

Abstract

The morphological quantification of filamentous microbes represents an important analytical technique in the optimization of bioprocesses involving such organisms, given the demonstrated links between morphology and metabolite yield. However, in many studies, much of this quantification has required some degree of manual intervention, if it has been conducted at all, burdening biotechnologists with a time-consuming process and potentially introducing bias into analyses. Here, software for the automated quantification of filamentous microbes is presented, implemented as a plug-in for the widely used, freely available image analysis package, ImageJ. The software, together with all related source code, documentation and test data, is freely available to the community via an online repository.