CLOCCS: Characterizing Loss of Cell Cycle Synchrony

Because it can be difficult to make measurements on single cells, populations of cells are often used to study dynamic processes such as cell division. Although various methods can be used to synchronize cell populations in discrete cell cycle phases, upon release from the synchronization, the underlying population loses synchrony and becomes distributed across multiple cell phases. Thus, quantitative measurements taken as the cell population traverses the cell cycle represent a convolution of values associated with cells in various phases. CLOCCS is a novel and flexible mathematical model that describes the dynamics of population distributions resulting from synchrony loss over time. The model captures multiple sources of synchrony loss, including effects related to cell reproduction. We show that this model reliably fits data collected from populations synchronized by multiple techniques. These data can be morphological (like presence of a bud in the yeast S. cerevisiae), flow cytometric (like amount of fluorescently stained DNA per cell), or most recently, any collection of binary markers observed across a population of individual cells (like presence of buds, myosin rings, duplicated spindle pole bodies, and nucleus spanning the bud neck in yeast, detected by fluorescent fusion constructs).

The current version of CLOCCS is 2.0.0.

Licensing Overview

You may license CLOCCS either under a non-commercial use license or under a specially-negotiated non-exclusive commercial use license. You may choose which type of license is more appropriate for your needs. For strictly non-commercial use of the software, you may prefer to license the software under the non-commercial use license. The term ‘commercial use’ is defined broadly: if the software is used for commercial gain or to further any commercial purpose, a commercial use license is required. If you have any question about whether your use would be considered commercial, or if you would like to negotiate a non-exclusive commercial use license, please contact us.