Adaptive Lane Finding

Empiria Studio 1.3 can automatically find lanes on a Western blot image using a patent-pending process called Adaptive Lane Finding (ALF). ALF detects the number of lanes and the precise boundaries of each lane. Using ALF to find lanes has three main advantages over finding lanes manually:

• Faster analysis: The researcher does not spend time manually defining placement of each lane.

• Fewer sources of variability: Because the researcher does not manually define lane placement, variability caused by subjective choices during lane placement is eliminated. Replicate lanes found using ALF can be compared knowing that all the lanes were found objectively according to the same criteria.

• Improved total protein stain quantification: Because lane location can be found precisely, relevant background can also be found precisely to consequently improve total protein stain (TPS) quantification. Quantifying the total protein in a lane is useful for accurate normalization that is recommended by journal guidelines (Journal of Biological Chemistry Collecting and Presenting Data. Journal of Biological Chemistry. American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Web. 24 September 2018.), so accurate TPS quantification is important for reliable Western blot results.

The ALF process provides these benefits by working with the patented Adaptive Background Subtraction (ABS) process (introduced in Empiria Studio 1.1). Lanes can still be found manually in Empiria Studio 1.3 (if necessary), providing consistency with previous versions of Empiria Studio.