LaneRuler

LaneRuler will identify lanes in a gel image. The core module is a command line c program, whose result can be reviewed and corrected using a java interface.

Project Description

A software package, named LaneRuler, has been developed for the automated lane tracking in electrophoresis gels, with a focus on gels for DNA fingerprinting. The lanes on such gels may not be straight and parallel due to various reasons, and these deviations must be accounted for in order to accurately size the restriction fragments in each lane. In order to meet the high throughput requirements by the projects at the British Columbia Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Center (GSC), the software has capability to verify and correct its results automatically, and prompting for user inspection only for extremely abnormal cases. In validation testing using Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clones, the automatic lane tracking results gave restriction fragment sizing results that are comparable to those from manually supervised lane tracking results, achieving sensitivity and specificity of restriction fragment identification exceeding 95%. The current conception of the program is able to successfully process 96% of the gels with no human intervention.

The software has also given good results with electrophoresis gel for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products and for cDNA.