Viral paque counting ImageJ Macro

This file is a recorded ImageJ macro for the work described in Kelnhofer-Millevolte et al. A novel method for quantifying human cytomegalovirus plaque assays . When studying the effect of viral or host genes on the production of new infective progeny, the plaque assay is the gold standard method employed. This assay is carried out by incubating serial dilutions of the supernatant to be investigated on a monolayer of permissive cells, allowing the virus to infect but spread only from cell-to-cell contact by covering the monolayer with an overlay, followed by quantifying the areas of cell death, or plaques, by fixing and staining with crystal violet. Here, we take advantage of the fluorescent nature of crystal violet staining to image hCMV plaques in a variety of modalities. Following the acquisition of these images, we developed a broadly applicable pipeline to use open access software ImageJ for quantifying the number and size of the hCMV plaques. The use of this method can provide a standardized way to objectively count and quantify the infectious progeny produced, allowing researchers to better understand viral spread.