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Updated: Oct 3, 2026

Agarose Gel Electrophoresis for the Separation of DNA Fragments
Published on: April 20, 2012
Automatic analysis of agarose gel images
P S Adiga1, A Bhomra, M G Turri
1Psychiatric Genetics Group, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Roosevelt Drive, Headington, Oxford OX3 7BN, UK.
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
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