Analysis of nuclear organization with TANGO, software for high-throughput quantitative analysis of 3D fluorescence microscopy images.

The cell nucleus is a highly organized cellular organelle that contains the genome. An important step to understand the relationships between genome positioning and genome functions is to extract quantitative data from three-dimensional (3D) fluorescence imaging. However, such approaches are limited by the requirement for processing and analyzing large sets of images. Here we present a practical approach using TANGO (Tools for Analysis of Nuclear Genome Organization), an image analysis tool dedicated to the study of nuclear architecture. TANGO is a generic tool able to process large sets of images, allowing quantitative study of nuclear organization. In this chapter a practical description of the software is drawn in order to give an overview of its different concepts and functionalities. This description is illustrated with a precise example that can be performed step-by-step on experimental data provided on the website http://biophysique.mnhn.fr/tango/HomePage.