Leaf Consumption Assay

ReliaSolve worked with Ramona Optics to develop a leaf consumption assay to automatically determine the fraction of each leaf plug that has been consumed by an organism. This ran on multiple images collected from a parallel microscope system observing 96-well plates. The algorithm deals with 18 imaging artifacts, including ignoring non-leaf material such as frass, leaf color variation, orders of magnitude difference in transparency from leaves in initial images to final images, halos around leaf edges, and lighting artifacts caused by balling up of the agarose feeding solution.