# Rhythmidia: A modern tool for circadian period analysis of filamentous fungi

## TL;DR

Rhythmidia is a new software tool that helps scientists analyze circadian rhythms in fungi more efficiently.

## Contribution

Rhythmidia introduces a GUI-based Python tool for automated analysis of circadian period and growth rate in Neurospora race tube experiments.

## Key findings

- Rhythmidia provides an efficient and accurate alternative to manual analysis of race tube data.
- The tool has been benchmarked against existing state-of-the-art methods and is open source.
- Rhythmidia is accessible via GitHub for easy adoption and further development.

## Abstract

Circadian rhythms are ubiquitous across the kingdoms of life and serve important roles in regulating physiology and behavior at many levels. These rhythms occur in ~24-hour cycles and are driven by a core molecular oscillator. Circadian timekeeping enables organisms to anticipate daily changes by timing their growth and internal processes. Neurospora crassa is a model organism with a long history in circadian biology, having conserved eukaryotic clock properties and observable circadian phenotypes. A core approach for measuring circadian function in Neurospora is to follow daily oscillations in the direction of growth and spore formation along a thin glass tube (race tube). While leveraging robust phenotypic readouts is useful, interpreting the outputs of large-scale race tube experiments by hand can be time-consuming and prone to human error. To provide the field with an efficient tool for analyzing race tubes, we present Rhythmidia, a graphical user interface (GUI) tool written in Python for calculating circadian periods and growth rates of Neurospora. Rhythmidia is open source, has been benchmarked against the current state-of-the-art, and is easily accessible on GitHub.