The progress in fluorescence microscopy
and information technologies have completely
transformed the study on living cells improving the
capability to quantify, investigate and analyze, in
time and space, single phenomena occurring inside
and outside cells. We developed an user-friendly
Graphical User Interface (GUI) able to extract and
analyze ion calcium (Ca2+) signals and to
understand how they regulate cell behavior and
metabolism. The software, named FluoLab
(Fluorescence Laboratory), works on acquired
confocal fluorescence microscopy images and allows
to obtain signals of Mean Fluorescence Intensity
(MFI). Afterwards, the fluorescence signals are
automatically converted in ion calcium
concentration values, [Ca2+], expressed in microMolarity
(μM), by using the specific dissociation
constant Kd
for each kind of fluorescent probes
chosen for the experiments. It is possible to analyze
contemporaneously more than one object through
the Region Of Interest (ROI) defined around them
and to follow them in time. FluoLab can also show a
normalization of the obtained data, compensating
automatically the image background and generating
a file that can be used for a fast data analysis
