A digital signal processing approach to analyze gel electrophoresis image

Abstract

Gel Electrophoresis (GE) is a widely used technique to separate DNA according to their size and weight, generates images that can be analyzed automatically. The separated DNA fragments or proteins of different molecular weights will give a series of bands with positions corresponding to the molecular weight. Image analysis of the gels removes much of the subjectivity of manual comparison of band position and intensity between samples. Briefly, this project presents a semiautomatic image processing techniques attempts to detect lanes, bands and length or size estimation of the bands. In this project, the routines are fully written in MATLAB R2008a. This project consists of three stages. The first stage is pre-processing, which involves conversion of RGB image into greyscale image. The second stage is to identify the number of lane in the image including the lane for marker and also to distinguish between the lane of marker and unknown DNA samples. The final stage is the identification of the length of DNA molecules each band in the lane based on data provided by the DNA marker.