Semi-automatic analysis of two-dimensional electrophoretic gels

摘要

A powerful technique, two dimensional gel electrophoresis, has recently become available for the analysis of biological material. This technique allows the proteins of a sample to be mapped on a two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel. The research outlined here involves a multi-disciplinary approach to the semi-automatic comparison of two gels of biologically similar materials. The aim of the project is to identify the significant differences between the gels and point them out to the electrophoresis expert. This job, when done by hand, can be time consuming, since the gels are distorted and can contain hundreds of protein spots. Automatic analysis of 2D gel separations has proved to be extremely difficult using statistical methods. Non-reproducibility of gel separations is also difficult to overcome using automatic systems. However, the human eye is extremely good at recognizing patterns in images, and human intervention in semi-automatic computer systems can reduce the computational complexity. This paper focuses on the intelligent knowledge-based systems aspects of the project, and in particular the work of the first author. The results demonstrate that the semi-automatic approach can produce reliable results quickly. Further work, beyond the scope of this paper, focuses on creating a database of gels for comparison.