We have a Molecular Dynamics Personal Digitizer which uses the same IQ software
as the Phosphoimager. We have been quite pleased with both the hardware and
software. The Digitizer ( and I believe the Phosphoimager) produce 12 bit intensity
data, so to take full advantage of the extended dynamic range, you need software
which can handle this larger format. As the software will also import 8 bit
TIFF files, we have used IQ to analyze data scanned in from an HP scanner. Although
only 8 bits, we find this a better way to go for Westerns and dotblots on nitrocellulose.
Our Digitizer is built around a 386 computer which is ether-netted to the campus network.
Both DOS and Mac users save their computed data as Excel worksheets which
they take back to their labs either by disk or over the network. Image files, which
tend to be rather large, are FTP'd or compressed onto 3 1/2" floppies for use in
slides, publications or proposals.
As an alternative, I am now evaluating a beta test copy of Sigmagel from Jandel. This
commercial software which will be released soon does analysis of position and intensity
of scanned images in many formats. Features include integration of peaks in gel lanes
manual and automated spot analysis, molecular weight calibration curves and a DNA
sequencing analysis package. These tools generally parallel those available in IQ
and seem to give similar results when applied to the same image data.
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Ellis Golub Phone: (215) 898-4629
Biochemistry Department FAX: (215) 898-3695
University of Pennsylvania ellis at biochem.dental.upenn.edu
School of Dental Medicine
4001 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6003
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==============================================================================
Ellis Golub Phone: (215) 898-4629
Biochemistry Department FAX: (215) 898-3695
University of Pennsylvania ellis at biochem.dental.upenn.edu
School of Dental Medicine
4001 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6003
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