Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 18, 2026

Agarose Gel Electrophoresis for the Separation of DNA Fragments
Published on: April 20, 2012
An automatic Method to identify and extract information of DNA bands in Gel Electrophoresis images
C R Caridade1, A S Margal, T Mendonga
1Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra, 3030-199 Coimbra, Portugal. caridade@isec.pt
Abstract:
This paper presents a system for the automatic processing of Digital Images obtained from Gel Electrophoresis. The system identifies automatically the number and the location of lanes in the digital image, as well as the location of bands on each lane, without any intervention from the user. A reference lane with a know substance is used to compute the molecular weight of the observed (unknown) bands. The system performance was tested using 12 images, obtained from 4 gels with 3 different exposures. A total of 5443 bands were tested in 12 images, 672 reference / observed lane pairs. The average error in the estimation of molecular weight of 9.2%.
Related Concept Videos
Two-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis
The first dimension separation uses the isoelectric focusing or IEF technique performed on immobilized pH gradient (IPG) strips that separate proteins according to their isoelectric points.
Biological samples, such as cells...
DNA Agarose Gel Electrophoresis
Gel extraction follows five major steps: running gel electrophoresis to separate fragments, isolating the individual bands, extracting DNA from those bands, and removing the dye and salts from the extracted mixture to obtain pure DNA.
In cloning experiments, both the insert and vector DNA...
Southern Blot
Denatured DNA fragments must be transferred onto a carrier membrane from the gel to make it accessible to a probe - a small ssDNA fragment complementary to the target DNA...
SDS-PAGE
A variation of gel electrophoresis, termed polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), is commonly used for separating proteins according to their molecular size by passing them through a polyacrylamide gel. Because of the varying charges associated with amino acid side chains, PAGE can be used to separate intact proteins...
Electrophoresis: Overview
There...
Western Blotting
The technique begins with separating proteins from the sample using sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE), followed by protein transfer, immunoblotting, and finally, protein detection.

