| The fundamental techniques involved in DNA fingerprinting were discovered serendipitously in 1984 by geneticist Alec J. Jeffreys of the University of Leicester in Great Britain while he was studying the gene for myoglobin, a protein that stores oxygen in muscle cells. The term "DNA fingerprinting" was coined to allude to the traditional use of fingerprints as the most unique mean of human identification. Now, DNA fingerprinting has become an indelible part of society, helping to prove innocence or guilt in criminal cases, resolving identifying victim and clarifying paternity. Furthermore, it has been used in the biology research widely, such as molecular biology research, the identification of the breed resource, crop heredity breeding, et al.It is a boring job for biologists to analysis the DNA fingerprint, which will cost them an abundance of time and energy. However, because of the limit of analysis by human, the result which analyze by different person may be different. Due to the development of computer science, it is become possible to establish an automatic DNA fingerprint analysis system which can recognize image, analyze data automatically.In 1988, British biologist John Sulston were first to develop methods for automating DNA fingerprint analysis. They developed software for lane tracking and band detection that was the precursor to the IMAGE package. After that, the scientist of America and Holland also began to research. Then, Bandleader and Cross Checker, the DNA fingerprint analysis system, was developedAlthough IMAGE is user-friendly and has impressive functionality in terms of image manipulation and display, the bandcalls it produces require significant manual verification. Furthermore, IMAGE was designed for analysis of fingerprints generated on acrylamide gels from end-labeled fragments represents typically only a portion of the DNA contained within the clone. This is in contrast to the agarose method employ currently by most researchers. Another drawback is IMAGE can only run on Solaris or Linux platform. For Chinese user, most of who use Windows operating system, it is useless.Band Leader, which was developed by Daniel R. Fuhrmann, et al., is a Windows' image processing and analysis application. It was designed especially to cater for the needs of the molecular biology and genetic researcher. It overcomes the shortage of IMAGE, but the methods provided by Bandleader is not enough and the interface of the software is not as user-friendly as IMAGE. Cross Checker is a simple computer package, developed for the binary or quantitative analysis of DNA fingerprinting patterns such as RFLP, RAPD and AFLP. Although the programprovides a semi-automatic analysis, it is mainly intended for computer-assisted interpretation and storage of interpretations.This research is supported by Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China. The paper analyzes the structure and algorithm of the DNA fingerprinting automatic analysis system, establishes a frame of DNA fingerprinting automatic analysis system, develops Confidence Interval Method which is based on threshold to divide image.The paper present a mathematical model for the location and shape of the restriction fragments as a function of fragment size. Automated identification of restriction fragment involves several steps, include: image preprocessing, to get rid of noise and enhance image, for instance, histogram equalization, Laplacian filter, Median filter, et al.; lane division, for division of the each lane of the fingerprint image. The purpose of this step is to assign allele band to a separate lane on the image. The column of pixels which has the most total intensity represents the optimal division between two allele lanes. A dividing line is drawn corresponding to that pixel column; lane analysis, for the last step of digital image processing. The task of the stage is to separate the every allele band from the background. The paper develops Confidence Interval Method to separate the image correctly. The fundamental of the method is: the all top intensi... |
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