Open gel analyzer / repository

[Pieter]

Anyone that has been working with gel electrophoresis a lot (either DNA / protein) probably knows that the analyzing and documenting of an enormous amount of gel / blot pictures is a pain.

Considering there are many fancy online image editors, why not try to develop an online gel analyzer? Not just for analyzing the gels, but also for creating an user friendly repository / API. Since gels are often the main result of biochemical / mol. gen. research, why not make an interactive place for publishing gels? It often annoyes me that you can only find cropped and enhanced gel pictures in articles...

I know there are a lot of talented programmers drifting around on these discussion groups, scouting for cool projects. 

Would anybody be interested in developing such a tool?

Desktop based examples are:

- Image J

- Band Leader

- TotalLab

- GelQuant.NET

- GelAnalyzer

[John Griessen]

On 04/01/2012 05:35 AM, Pieter wrote:
> why not try to develop an online gel analyzer? Not just for analyzing the gels, but also for creating an user friendly repository

That sounds like a plausible concept -- that some researchers would use an online tool to reformat
gel images and create databases. Many might not want their half-baked ideas on a public forum though.
For the ones that think public "as you go" is fine there could be benefits of having a range of image treatments
and analyses available. What would be in it for the developer though? Most web app providers
make money off their sites by subscriptions or ads.

Here is a fairly easy to operate web site for electronic symbols and footprints used by
designers along with the FOSS gEDA tool suite for making circuit boards:

http://gedasymbols.org

I host a mirror of the site.

It uses cvs, the version control system, to work. Users ask for a password to be able to add content,
then they get a checked out copy of their section of the site, and after they make changes
they give the command cvs update to publish it. That requires a password saved in a special place on
your machine, and some familiarity with cvs. It's not as convenient as most web apps because of those details,
but that makes it easy to maintain, for a free service.