Matching 2D gel electrophoresis images with Matlab ‘Image Processing Toolbox’

Analysis of proteomic data requires the alignment of 2D gel electropherograms. The Matlab ‘Image Processing Toolbox’ contains many interesting subroutines to deal with image processing. Among them there is a subroutine for manual markers selection. Attractive in many cases, it is time-consuming and error prone in the case of gel images, which contain thousands of spots with unknown correspondence. Replacing this subroutine with a fuzzy warping algorithm allows efficient automatic identification of corresponding features. In this paper the principles of image alignment are described and demonstrated using real examples.