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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 jonathan.flint@well.ox.ac.uk

Original publication

DOI

10.1093/bioinformatics/17.11.1084

Type

Journal article

Journal

Bioinformatics

Publication Date

11/2001

Volume

17

Pages

1084 - 1089

Keywords

Animals, Computational Biology, DNA, Electrophoresis, Agar Gel, Genetic Markers, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Polymorphism, Genetic, Sequence Analysis, DNA, Software, Software Design