Epithelial cells are defined by apical-basal and planar cell polarity (PCP) signaling, the latter of which establishes an orthogonal plane of polarity in the epithelial sheet. PCP signaling is required for normal cell migration, differentiation, stem cell generation and tissue repair, and defects in PCP have been associated with developmental abnormalities, neuropathologies and cancers. While the molecular mechanism of PCP is incompletely understood, the deepest insights have come from Drosophila, where PCP is manifest in hairs and bristles across the adult cuticle and organization of the ommatidia in the eye. Fly wing cells are marked by actin-rich trichome structures produced at the distal edge of each cell in the developing wing epithelium and in a mature wing the trichomes orient collectively in the distal direction. Genetic screens have identified key PCP signaling pathway components that disrupt trichome orientation, which has been measured manually in a tedious and error prone process. Here we describe a set of image processing and pattern-recognition macros that can quantify trichome arrangements in micrographs and mark these directly by color, arrow or colored arrow to indicate trichome location, length and orientation. Nearest neighbor calculations are made to exploit local differences in orientation to better and more reliably detect and highlight local defects in trichome polarity. We demonstrate the use of these tools on trichomes in adult wing preps and on actin-rich developing trichomes in pupal wing epithelia stained with phalloidin. FijiWingsPolarity is freely available and will be of interest to a broad community of fly geneticists studying the effect of gene function on PCP.

上皮细胞由顶基和平面细胞极性（PCP）信号传导定义，后者在上皮层中建立正交的极性平面。PCP信号传导是正常细胞迁移，分化，干细胞生成和组织修复所必需的，并且PCP的缺陷与发育异常，神经病理学和癌症有关。尽管对五氯苯酚的分子机制尚未完全了解，但最深刻的见解来自果蝇。，其中PCP出现在成人角质层的毛发和鬃毛中，以及眼中眼孔的组织。飞翅细胞的特征是在发育中的翼上皮细胞的每个细胞的远端边缘处产生了富含肌动蛋白的毛状体结构，而在成熟的机翼中，毛状体的毛状体结构共同指向远端。遗传筛查已经确定了破坏毛状体定向的关键PCP信号通路成分，这是在繁琐且容易出错的过程中手动测量的。在这里，我们描述了一组图像处理和模式识别宏，它们可以量化显微照片中的毛状体排列，并直接通过颜色，箭头或彩色箭头标记这些毛状体，以指示毛状体的位置，长度和方向。进行了最近的邻居计算，以利用方向的局部差异来更好，更可靠地检测并突出显示毛状体极性中的局部缺陷。我们证明了这些工具在成年翅膀准备中的毛状体上和在用鬼笔环肽染色的p翼上皮中富含肌动蛋白的发育毛状体上的使用。FijiWingsPolarity是免费提供的，将对研究基因功能对PCP的影响的广泛的蝇类遗传学家产生兴趣。