An R package to automate the analysis of double-strand break repair during meiosis
Synapsis is a Bioconductor software package for automated (unbiased and reproducible) analysis of meiotic immunofluorescence datasets. The primary functions of the software can i) identify cells in meiotic prophase that are labelled by a synaptonemal complex axis or central element protein, ii) isolate individual synaptonemal complexes and measure their physical length, iii) quantify foci and co-localise them with synaptonemal complexes, iv) measure interference between synaptonemal complex-associated foci. The software has applications that extend to multiple species and to the analysis of other proteins that label meiotic prophase chromosomes. The software converts meiotic immunofluorescence images into R data frames that are compatible with machine learning methods. Given a set of microscopy images of meiotic spread slides, synapsis crops images around individual single cells, counts colocalising foci on strands on a per cell basis, and measures the distance between foci on any given strand.