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High-Fidelity Long-term Whole-embryo Lineage and Fate Reconstruction by Iterative Tracking with Error Correction

Wang, M.; Zhang, Q.; Wang, C.; Chi, Y.; Zheng, W.; Mu, Z.; Cao, X.; Zhang, W.; Yang, B.; Schier, A. F.; Acedo, J. N.; Wan, Y.; Yu, G.

2026-03-16 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.03.12.711203 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Reconstructing the complete cell lineages and fate maps of a living embryo has remained a central challenge in developmental biology. Here we introduce ITEC (Iterative Tracking with Error Correction), a fully unsupervised method that automatically reconstructs the lineage of every cell in the embryo with high fidelity. ITEC was validated with manually annotated lineages on four cross-species datasets including zebrafish, mouse, and Drosophila. We reconstructed the developmental lineages of a zebrafish embryo from terabyte-scale data of total 18.5 million cells with an estimated accuracy of over 99.7%. With ITEC, we revealed spatiotemporal dynamics of key morphogenetic processes such as somite boundary formation, demonstrated the various patterns of spatial sorting among adjacent organs or anatomical regions, and identified associations between cellular movement and spatial transcriptomics. ITEC provides a powerful platform for retrospective fate mapping and systematic exploration of developmental dynamics at the cellular scale and single-embryo level.

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