ELBAMAP: software for management of electrophoresis banding patterns

ELBAMAP (Electrophoresis Band Management Package) is a 41-kbyte program written in Borland Turbo Pascal, which will run on IBM PC compatible machines. The program consists of 16 procedures involved in data entry, calculation, comparison and graphic representation of banding patterns. These procedures are selected interactively in response to a main menu and a series of prompts. Database files may be stored for subsequent analysis or addition of data. Pairwise comparisons of banding patterns may be stored as a similarity matrix suitable for use by other packages which will carry out multivariate or cluster analysis. The system has been used successfully for storage and comparison of plasmid DNA digest patterns analysed by agarose gel electrophoresis and seed promoter profiles analysed by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.