Development of Crystallization Distinction Supporting System Using Image Processing

In the post-genome era. it is one of important research subject to Investigate the roles of the proteins in human body based on decoded genome information during Human Genome Project. In order to clarify them. it is necessary to analyze the structure of the protein crystals and their function. ' Crystallization is the beginning stage of protein structure determination process. There are some methods for structural analysis of the proteins, and general one is X-ray structural analysis method. In order to utilize this method for analyzing the protein crystal's structure, artificial protein crystallization is required. However, since artificial crystallizing work takes much time and manpower. the performance against its cost is still low. Therefore. we started to discuss to develop a supporting system for improving efficiency of the crystallization distinction procedure. In this paper, we examine to realize such supporting system for crystallization distinction using image-processing technique and report about our experimental result with many real protein solution images.