Automatic analysis of agarose gel images.

Journal article

MOTIVATION: Automatic tools to speed up routine biological processes are very much sought after in bio-medical research. Much repetitive work in molecular biology, such as allele calling in genetic analysis, can be made semi-automatic or task specific automatic by using existing techniques from computer science and signal processing. Computerized analysis is reproducible and avoids various forms of human error. Semi-automatic techniques with an interactive check on the results speed up the analysis and reduce the error. RESULTS: We have successfully implemented an image processing software package to automatically analyze agarose gel images of polymorphic DNA markers. We have obtained up to 90% accuracy for the classification of alleles in good quality images and up to 70% accuracy in average quality images. These results are obtained within a few seconds. Even after subsequent interactive checking to increase the accuracy of allele classification to 100%, the overall speed with which the data can be processed is greatly increased, compared to manual allele classification. AVAILABILITY: The IDL source code of the software is available on request from [email protected]

Authors: Adiga, P; Bhomra, A; Turri, MG; Nicod, A; Datta, SR

• Journal: Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 1084-1089
• Publication date: 2001-11-01
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/17.11.1084
• EISSN: 1367-4811
• ISSN: 1367-4803
• Language: English
• Keywords: Computational Biology; Polymorphism, Genetic; Software; Software Design; Electrophoresis, Agar Gel; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Animals; DNA; Sequence Analysis, DNA; Genetic Markers