University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science

Yi Luo
will defend his thesis

New Tools for Microarray and 2D Gel Image Analysis

Abstract

With the far-reaching benefits and challenges of genome research, microarray and 2D gel electrophoresis are essential to biological exploration. Microarray provides the capability to analyze expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously, allowing scientists to gain a complete picture of the gene function and expression profiles. 2D gel electrophoresis plays an equally important role in gene analysis, separating and identifying proteins of interest. Together they can explore inter-related gene and protein expressions. A crucial step in both technologies is image processing and analysis. While commercially software packages are available, each suffers from particular limitations. Our goal is to create a suite of Windows-based application tools to facilitate the analysis of both microarray and 2D gel images.

For microarray images, an accurate and efficient gridding method is proposed. In a comparative analysis, our program ImageAnalyzer and ArrayVision from Imaging Research Inc. afforded comparable results. To provide a sophisticated application for image processing and analysis of 2D gel images, we developed GelAnalyzer. Together ImageAnalyzer and GelAnalyzer, presently used by the University of Houston research community, offer a function-rich, extensible, user friendly and open source alternative tool for microarray and 2D gel image processing and analysis.

Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Time: 9:00 AM
Place: 550-PGH



Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Yuriy Fofanov