Quantification of Lipid Droplets in Tetrahymena thermophila

The Lipid Lab at St. Olaf investigates factors affecting the formation of lipid droplets in the model organism Tetrahymena thermophila. To gather data, students in lab have manually counted lipid droplets. Each organism can have up to several hundred droplets, and each image from the microscope can have several organisms. I created a program, lipidcountr, that uses image processing to automate the counting of lipid droplets in these cells.