Fig. 3

Change in cell area, circularity and aspect ratio during THP-1 differentiation. a Exemplary brightfield (transmitted laser light) images of THP-1 cells during the 6 day monitoring phase with segmentation lines (red) produced by our algorithm. b Projected cell area increases during differentiation. After an initial growth phase, cells enter a plateau phase and then show a second period of growth after day 4. c Circularity values stay constant until day 4 before decreasing on day 5 and 6. d Increasing aspect ratio on day 5 and day 6 indicates cellular elongation. These data together highlight the shape change toward a more elongated phenotype at longer times after differentiation. Data are shown as mean ± sem. **,*** and **** indicate p < 0.01, 0.001 and 0.0001, respectively (ANOVA with post-hoc Tukey test). The number of cells for each day, starting from day 1 to day 6: 110, 114, 135, 113, 121, 91 with at least n ≥ 10 images were analyzed from two pooled experiments per day. Scale bar is 100 μm