Clustering of 2D-Gel Images

Alignment of 2D-gel images of biological samples can visualize the difference of expression profiles and also inform us candidates of protein spots to be further analyzed. However, comparison of two proteome images between case and control does not always successfully identify differentially expressed proteins due to sample-to-sample variation. Because of poor reproducibility of 2D-gel electrophoresis, sample-by-sample variations and inconsistent electrophoresis conditions, multiple number of 2D-gel image must be processed to align each other to visualize the difference of expression profiles and to deduce the protein spots differentially expressed with reliability. Alignment of multiple 2D-Gel images and their clustering were carried out by applying various algorithms and statistical methods. In order to align multiple images, multiresolution-multilevel algorithm was found out to be suitable for fast alignment and for distorted images. Clustering of 12 different images implementing a k-means algorithm gives a phylogenetic tree of distance map of the proteomes. Microsoft Visual C++ was used to implement the algorithms in this work.