densitometry/mol weight calculation

[Michael Lichten]

Yes, as long as your scanner software saves stuff as a TIFF file.  The best 
Mac densitometry/image analysis software for the price is NIH Image.  It's 
free.  You can get it by anonymous FTP from zippy.nimh.nih.gov (128.231.98.
32), directory /pub/nih-image contains the latest version of Image and 
documentation.  The file names are obvious.  Image is a _great_ program and 
is the work of Wayne Rasband, a living national treasure at NIH.  We use it 
for densitometry of autoradiograms constantly.  It can also do 1-D 
measurements, so when I need to size fragments I use it in combination with 
Gel-JML, which can be had on the biosoftware server at the University of 
Indiana (I don't have that address right now--anyone out there does?).  You 
can also use NCSA GelReader, available by anonymous FTP from zaphod.ncsa.
uiuc.edu to do fragment sizing on gels.  It's a very elegant program, 
includes automatic band detection, etc. but it's too fancy for my tastes, 
and I find myself having to add and get rid of bands more often than I 
would like.  It will also take data in a TIFF format.  

There are other packages that you actually have to pay money for (heaven 
forbid!) but we have found that the above three programs are more than 
enough to meet our needs.

Michael lichten at helix.nih.gov