FAβ-gal: Fluorescence Analysis of β-galactosidase activity

🔥 NEWS 🔥: FAβ-gal preprint is now available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.27.707795v2

FAβ-gal is a method that joins the simplicity, fast execution, low cost and versatility of the classical SA-β-gal assay with the quantification and sensitivity of fluorescence assays. It exploits the far-red fluorescence of X-gal product (Levitsky et al., 2013) coupled with a count of cell nuclei powered by BiaPy to quantify in a semiautomatic and unbiased manner SA-β-gal activity. This github repository is dedicated to the image analysis part od the method. To read the full method go to FAβ-gal publication

FAβ-gal R Shinny application

We have developed a Shiny application that enables a user-friendly usage of our analysis method. For more details, see the full documentation in the Wiki

FAβ-gal computational pipeline

We have designed a ready-to-use Python computational workflow that enables a more customable use of FAβ-gal and its use in high-throughput experiments. For more details, see the full documentation in the Wiki

Authors

Name	Role	Affiliations
Antonio G. Tartiere	Creator, Implementation	Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Instituto Universitario de Oncología (IUOPA), Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Principado de Asturias (ISPA), Oviedo, Spain
David Roiz-Valle	Implementation	Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Instituto Universitario de Oncología (IUOPA), Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Principado de Asturias (ISPA), Oviedo, Spain
José M. P. Freije	Supervision	Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Instituto Universitario de Oncología (IUOPA), Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Principado de Asturias (ISPA), Oviedo, Spain Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Cáncer (CIBERONC), Madrid, Spain
Alejandro P. Ugalde	Creator, Implementation, Software design	Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Instituto Universitario de Oncología (IUOPA), Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Principado de Asturias (ISPA), Oviedo, Spain

Citation

Please note that FAβ-gal is based on a publication. If you use it successfully for your research please be so kind to cite our work: "FAβ-gal: an automated fluorescence-based quantification of the senescence-associated beta-galactosidase X-gal assay"