A New Way to Quantify Chemotaxis and Cell Migration

Checkout our new FastTrack AI Chemotaxis PC app (with free evaluation): FastTrack AI Chemotaxis App

 

Cell migration sits at the heart of many of the most important questions in biology — from immune response and cancer metastasis to wound healing, angiogenesis, and tissue development. Yet, for decades, the field has been caught between two imperfect options:

1. Simple assays that are easy to run but provide only coarse, population-level measurements, or

2. Sophisticated imaging experiments that generate rich time-lapse data but are painfully slow and subjective to analyze.

MetaVi Labs’ new Chemotaxis and Migration Analysis platform was built specifically to close this gap.

Our goal is straightforward:

Make rigorous, single-cell migration analysis fast, automated, reproducible, and accessible to any lab that already performs time-lapse imaging.

Why traditional analysis falls short

Most migration assays produce movies of cells moving over time. Those movies contain enormous amounts of biological information — but extracting that information has historically required:

• Manual cell tracking

• Custom scripts written by specialists

• Ad-hoc measurements in ImageJ/Fiji

• Or proprietary analysis tied to a single instrument

These approaches are slow, inconsistent across users, and difficult to scale beyond a handful of experiments. As a result, many labs settle for simpler readouts (e.g., “how many cells crossed a membrane?” or “percent wound closure?”), even when they actually care about deeper questions like:

• Are cells truly moving toward the gradient?

• How persistent is their motion?

• Do subpopulations behave differently?

• How variable is the response from cell to cell?

MetaVi Labs was designed to answer these questions systematically.

What MetaVi Labs Chemotaxis Analysis does

Our software takes raw time-lapse microscopy data and converts it into quantitative, publication-ready metrics, including:

• Automated single-cell tracking across thousands of cells

• Cell speed and persistence

• Directionality relative to a gradient

• Forward Migration Index (FMI) and corrected FMI

• Center-of-mass displacement

• Mean squared displacement (MSD)

• Statistical tests for directional bias (e.g., Rayleigh analysis)

• Population-level summaries and visualizations

Crucially, this is not tied to any single microscope or assay format. If you can generate a time-lapse movie of migrating cells, MetaVi Labs can analyze it.

How MetaVi Labs complements existing assay systems

MetaVi Labs does not replace existing chemotaxis hardware — it amplifies its value.

Think of it as an analysis layer that sits on top of whatever system you already use.

For example, many labs already rely on:

• Incubator imaging platforms

• High-content microscopes

• Microfluidic gradient devices

• Traditional Boyden or transwell assays

• Scratch (wound closure) assays

These tools are excellent at creating data. MetaVi Labs is optimized for extracting meaning from that data.

Where traditional software might give you a curve or a single number, MetaVi Labs gives you a multi-metric, statistically grounded view of how cells are actually behaving.

Why this is especially powerful with ibidi Chemotaxis slides

One of the most common and biologically rigorous platforms for studying directed migration is the ibidi µ-Slide Chemotaxis system.

ibidi slides are widely used because they create stable diffusion-based gradients and are ideal for:

• Live-cell imaging

• Single-cell migration studies

• 2D or 3D matrix experiments

• Long-duration time-lapse recordings

However, while ibidi provides excellent hardware for generating gradients and movies, most users still face a bottleneck at the analysis stage.

Historically, researchers using ibidi slides have had to choose between:

• Manual tracking (too slow for large datasets), or

• Basic semi-automated tools that lack robust statistics and reproducibility

This is where MetaVi Labs truly shines.

With MetaVi Labs + ibidi, you get:

• Fully automated tracking of hundreds to thousands of cells per experiment

• Objective, reproducible measurements rather than hand-picked tracks

• True chemotaxis metrics (not just migration speed)

• The ability to compare conditions quantitatively across replicates

• A scalable workflow suitable for drug screening, perturbation studies, or mechanistic biology

Instead of analyzing a handful of representative cells, you can analyze entire populations, revealing heterogeneity that would otherwise remain hidden.

From experiment to insight — faster

A typical workflow now looks like this:

1. Set up your experiment in an ibidi chemotaxis slide

2. Acquire time-lapse images on your preferred microscope

3. Load the image sequence into MetaVi Labs

4. Let the software automatically track cells and compute metrics

5. Export figures, statistics, and visualizations for reports or manuscripts

What used to take days can now be completed in minutes.

Who this is for

MetaVi Labs Chemotaxis Analysis is particularly valuable for researchers working in:

• Cell biology

• Immunology

• Cancer biology

• Developmental biology

• Angiogenesis and wound healing

• Stem cell migration

• Drug discovery and screening

If you care about how cells move — not just whether they move — this tool was built for you.

Looking ahead

As migration biology becomes increasingly quantitative, the field needs tools that combine biological rigor with computational power. MetaVi Labs was created to meet that need.

By pairing state-of-the-art analysis with widely used experimental platforms like ibidi, we aim to make high-quality chemotaxis measurement routine rather than exceptional.

If you are already running chemotaxis experiments, you likely already have the data you need — MetaVi Labs can help you unlock its full potential.

You can learn more about the platform here:
https://metavilabs.com/chemotaxis_analysis.html