3.7 Identify Bands in Experimental Lanes

After the image is normalized, you may invoke the process which detects bands in the experimental lanes. From another menu, you may choose to detect automatically, semi-automatically, or manually. Each band detected is marked with a small bar across the lane in which the band was detected; on color displays, this bar is green. The user may edit the results of the band detection to add or delete band bars as necessary. Deleting band bars may be necessary where the peak-detection algorithm erroneously identifies an artifact on the image as a band. Interactive band bar addition may be required to identify low-intensity bands. Where two bands are very closely spaced, the program may flag just one band as it may not be able to separate adjacent intensity peaks. Editing is similar to that described earlier in Section 3.5.

• Pointer to Operations Submenu, click [Exp Bands] .
• The Experimental Bands Process Menu appears (Figure 3.12).

Figure 3.12: Experimental Bands Process Menu.

Its buttons and meanings are:
- [Automatic] Band detection is automatic, followed by editing.

- [Semi-automatic] Put band at peak intensity near click.

- [Manual] You pick the location of each band bar.

- [Edit] The same as automatic.

- [Clear] If bands have been detected, they are cleared.

- [Cancel] You choose not to detect bands at this point.

Clicking any of these menu buttons forces the menu to disappear. Clicking [Clear] or [Cancel] returns control to the Operations Submenu. Clicking any of the others keeps you in an edit mode until MB3 is clicked, at which point control is returned to the Operations Submenu.
• As each band is identified, its base-pair size appears in the Status Information Region.

• During editing, a popup window allows you to switch between semi-automatic and manual editing modes. This is the same popup which appears for the size-standard bands (Figure 3.8). The popup has one button which toggles between [On] and [Off] (you do/don't want semi-automatic editing).

• Clicking MB3 indicates the end of editing, and control is returned to the Operations Submenu. You may re-enter experimental band detection; click [Exp Bands] . Figure 3.13 shows the finished analyzed image. Experimental bands are shown in green.