‘miSimBa’ — A simulator of synthetic time-lapsed microscopy images of bacterial cells

Escherichia coli is a model organism for the study of multiple biological processes, including gene expression and cellular aging. Recently, these studies started to rely on temporal single cell imaging. To support these efforts, available automated image analysis methods should be improved. One important step is their validation. Ideally, the 'ground truth' of the images should be known, which is possible only in synthetic images. To simulate artificial images of E. coli cells, we are developing the 'miSimBa' tool (Microscopy Image Simulator of Bacterial Cells). 'miSimBa' simulates images that reproduce the spatial and temporal bacterial organization by modelling realistically cell morphology (shape, size and spatial arrangement), cell growth and division, cell motility and some internal functions and intracellular structures, namely, the nucleoid. This tool also incorporates image acquisition parameters that simulate illumination and the primary sources of noise.