The tool: band-it
This tool allows you to open an image of a gel and quickly quantify the intensity of bands. (Please note, it is designed to be used and works best in Chrome) Select an image by either clicking the top left choose file button or by drag and dropping an image onto the page and it will appear in the middle of the workspace. Once you've loaded an image, you can manipulate it using the controls in the control panel above the main workspace. You can edit the image using the edit image button where you can control the min pixel value, max pixel value, and the gamma. Any annotations added to the image will scale/rotate with the image.
Auto band detection: This option is on by default and causes the program to try to detect bands on a new line when you first drag across an image.
Center: Centers the image in the viewport if it has been dragged away. An image can be moved by holding down the Shift key and dragging it.
Reset all: Resets all the image's applied transformations including rotations, scaling, contrast, and inversion.
Screenshot: Screenshots the current view including all lines so you can save an image of how you performed the quantification.
Edit Image: Brings up a menu that allows you to change the rotation and scale of the image as well as the pixel values (min, max, and gamma).
Crop: When clicked will generate a cropbox that can then be adjusted. Clicking crop again will perform the crop action.
Shifting lines and the image: Hold the shift key to drag either the entire image or any individual line.
Dragging across the image will result in the addition of a new line as seen in teal below "L1" with 6 regions numbered 1 to 6 from the start to end.
Each line has 3 draggable points (the start node, the middle control node, and the end node). By default all lines start out as straight lines, but they can be bent by dragging any one of these 3 points.
Move an existing line across an image by holding down the shift key and dragging any part of the line.
New regions can be created by dragging across a line. Existing regions can be moved along a line by dragging them in the middle. To extend a region in either direction just drag it starting from either its left or its right edge.
All lines and their associated regions will appear on the right control panel. In this area you can edit lines using the edit dropdown menu. The menu allows you to duplicate the line, copy region intensities to the clipboard, copy the pixel values across the line (via the copy intensity profile option), copy all regions band intensities (via the copy values button), and clear all the regions (via the clear all button). There is also an equalize regions option that allows you to uniformly distribute all existing regions on the line so they have the same width. Finally the auto detect regions applies the automatic band detection on the line. There is a global width control that allows you to simulatenously change the width of all regions in that line. You can also manually set the number of regions using the num regions slider which will evenly divide a line into the selected number of regions. Finally there is the region gap control that specifies the size of the gap between regions.
Each region has a seperate width controller that allows you to change the width of only that region. Each region displays a background subtracted intensity measurement (sum) and the number of pixels in its bounds (pixel count).
Copy to clipboard: Copy the background subtracted intensity measurements from all regions in a format that can be pasted into another spreadsheet program.
Download: Download background subtracted intensity measurement from all regions as a CSV file.
Clear all: Delete all lines and their associated regions.