A survey on gel images analysis software tools

One of the most severe sources of information for a molecular biologist is the gel image generated by using gel electrophoresis during the experiment of issr-pcr, sds-pages, and rapd-pcr. DNA and protein gel images are obtained through the gel electrophoresis separations techniques of DNA and protein fragments. The separation of the polymorphic bands is based on the sizes of the negatively charged DNA fragments running from the negative cathode toward the positive anode. Each gel image has some vertical lanes; each lane corresponds to one sample and has several horizontal bands. The resulting images produced by Gel electrophoresis are sometimes difficult to interpret so that it was important to develop software tools to analyze the gel images to help biologists in the process of analyzing gel image as they draw their conclusions according to the results that generated from gel image analyzer software. In this article, we present a survey of some commercial and non-commercial software tools that are used for analyzing gel images. We develop a novel software for processing and analyzing the gel electrophoresis images, computing the molecular weights, saving them as excel sheet, clustering the bands based on their molecular weights using k-means algorithm, Applying band matching using a tolerance value entered by the user, determine the similarities between samples, drawing the corresponding phylogenetic tree, saving a report of the experiment as a pdf, and printing this report. The novel software will provide the biologist with the ability of manual processing, automatic processing, and semi-automatic processing.