A novel approach to spot detection for two-dimensional gel electrophoresis images using pixel value collection.

Separation of complex mixtures of proteins by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) is a fundamental component of current proteomic technology. Quantitative analysis of the images generated by digitization of such gels is critical for the identification of alterations in protein expression within a given biological system. Despite the availability of several commercially available software packages designed for this purpose, image analysis is extremely resource intensive, subjective and remains a major bottleneck.