FluoLab: A New Easy-to-use Graphical User Interface for the Multi-cell Functional Calcium Signals Analysis

The progress in fluorescence microscopy and information technologies have completely transformed the study on living cells improving the capability to quantify, investigate and analyze, in time and space, single phenomena occurring inside and outside cells. We developed an user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) able to extract and analyze ion calcium (Ca2+) signals and to understand how they regulate cell behavior and metabolism. The software, named FluoLab (Fluorescence Laboratory), works on acquired confocal fluorescence microscopy images and allows to obtain signals of Mean Fluorescence Intensity (MFI). Afterwards, the fluorescence signals are automatically converted in ion calcium concentration values, [Ca2+], expressed in microMolarity (\u3bcM), by using the specific dissociation constant Kd for each kind of fluorescent probes chosen for the experiments. It is possible to analyze contemporaneously more than one object through the Region Of Interest (ROI) defined around them and to follow them in time. FluoLab can also show a normalization of the obtained data, compensating automatically the image background and generating a file that can be used for a fast data analysi