Windows program is able to analyse images of a wide variety of material including polyacrylamide and agarose gels, autoradiograms, and TLC plates
Announcing the new version 3.0 of Biosoft's QuantiScan, the Windows program which turns an office scanner into a powerful densitometer.
QuantiScan for Windows has similar functionality to sophisticated densitometers but at a fraction of the cost.
It is able to analyse images of a wide variety of material including polyacrylamide and agarose gels, autoradiograms, TLC plates, etc, says Biosoft.
The new version of QuantiScan has numerous improvements.
QuantiScan accepts image files from any source including scanners and cameras.
It has separate modules for the analysis of laned gels and discrete blots.
Both can be highly automated or manually controlled.
Numeric and graphical output from QuantiScan can be printed or easily transferred to other programs.
Lanes of any width can be created and they can be skewed or curved to allow for gel imperfections.
They can be duplicated to enable exact between-lane comparisons.
Each lane can be labelled with an unique number both on its image and its densitometry profile plot.
There are six options for automatic background subtraction: minimum, interpolated-minimum, valley, edge, polynomial and manual.
Peak areas are computed with Simpson's rule and optionally also by automatic fitting of Gaussian peaks.
Calibration to a lane containing standard proteins can be made for automatic calculation of molecular weights.
Densitometry profiles are automatically graphed and reports are generated for all peak parameters, including position, height, width, background and net area.
In blot mode the number, position, height, area and densitometric volume are automatically reported.
Automatic background subtraction is an option.
Calibration, based on densitometric volume of standard blots can be done, and this allows blot mode to be used for assays.
Just some of the many improvements in ver 3.0.
Image importing has been greatly enhanced and images are now scrollable and zoomable.
Jpeg format images can now be analysed.
The new automatic background subtraction option 'manual' draws the background between the points where the peak boundaries intersect the densitometry profile.
This makes precise user-definition of background possible even when the profile is noisy.
A new automatic detection method has been added to blot mode for regular arrays.
This places equal-sized selection rectangles around each blot to enable accurate comparisons.
The option to copy X,Y coordinates of densitometry profiles from the plot context menu has been enhanced so that data from all the profiles are output into a tabbed table.
They can then be re-plotted in presentation graphics programs such as Biosoft's FigSys.
