ImageJ is a very useful and free program which has been made available by NIH. It also includes many useful plug-ins including gel documentation libraries, 2D FFT filtering, and much more.
If you are interested in a copy, visit: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/. The program itself is a Java update to an earlier program called NIHImage. The author W. Rasband deserves considerable thanks for his assistance bringing quantitative image analysis to biologists – and to us.
The gel documentation system we used to take pictures in lab are in a non-standard image format. By this I mean it is not in one of the commonly recognized image formats like tif, jpg, gif, fits, etc. This means that you will have to load the file using ImageJ’s import features. To do this follow these steps:
1) In imageJ use the file menu and select import->raw
2) This brings up a dialog box for you to select your file. Choose the one you want.
3) When you open the file, a dialog box asking for image type, width, height, offset, etc. will appear. Select the following:type = 8 bit.width 974,height = 1280offset = 300number of images = 1.gap between image = 0.
The three check boxes (“white is zero”, “Little-Endian Byte Order”, and “Open All Files in Folder”) at the bottom should NOT be checked.
If you then say Ok your file should load correctly.
If you have old gel pictures from other classes, you may want to play around with the “Gels” functions. You will find this (at least in the version I am currently using) at the bottom of the “Analyze” menu option.
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