Analysis of one-dimensional electrophoregrams.

One-dimensional electrophoresis is widely used for the estimation of molecular weight, genotype determination, identification of varieties and DNA sequencing. Many tools have been developed in numerous laboratories in order to perform semi-automatic and sometimes automatic analysis of gels. A one-dimensional electrophoregram consists of lanes and bands; pertinent information is essentially one-dimensional and, for each lane, entirely contained in an optical density profile. Detection of lanes and bands, quantitative analysis and fragment size or molecular weight calculation are provided by some software packages. Here we present our approach to one-dimensional gel analysis using digitized images. We concentrate on the correction of global distortion that may result from inhomogeneous electric field through the gel and on the interpretation of gels in the specific case of genetic studies of families. The package contains most of the usual facilities found in other special-purpose software for one-dimensional gel analysis but particular attention is given here to distortions and interpretation.