In most cases reliable data may be acquired just by clicking the right mouse button. The same system provides the possibility of morphologic corrections improving the segmentations of comets.
A careful calibration of both the hardware and the measuring procedure is required in order to get reliable results. A tight junction between the photometric measurements and the visual display of the detected comet shape represents a significant advantage of the LUCIA Comet Assay System. The user may adjust interactively the comet segmentation and head-tail separation.
The double staining system is a special version of the LUCIA Comet Assay. It uses two independent system settings and provides a pseudocolor display of the two different fluorescence images. The user decides which image is taken as the reference for the comet segmentation. The photometric features are then measured individually for both fluorescence images but the mask is the same. The measured features include: Head Radius, Tail Length, and Integral Intensity, Head_DNA%, Tail_DNA%, Tail_Moment, Olive_Moment for both the first and the second staining.
Arabidopsis comet, nuclei prepared from a root
The comet after threshold
Automatic segmentation of the comet head and the comet tail and the display of the integral intensity histogram.
The segmented comet with the intensity histogram after morphological filtering.