SACHET: seeded contour tracking measures Rab conversion kinetics on individual endosomes in live cells
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Membrane-labeled endosomes appear as hollow rings in a projection; they move, deform and exchange their coat, which population trackers (tools that detect every object of one kind and link the detections across frames) are not designed to follow. Here we introduce SACHET (Seeded Adaptive Contour & Hollow Endosome Tracking), a human-supervised Fiji tool that tracks one endosome at a time. On simulated ground truth it localizes the center to 10 nm, recovers transition time constants and lags without bias and holds the target among touching neighbors; comparisons with tuned TrackMate and Cellpose delineate where each is superior. In crowded spinning-disk projections, TrackMate followed one of seven marked Rab5-to-Rab7 conversions; supervised SACHET followed all 37. SACHET thus provides a stable per-endosome frame in which membrane morphology and protein exchange can be quantified: in five cell lines the conversion toggles like a digital switch within seconds to minutes, differing between lines.
Language: English
Subfield: Biophysics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225184816