Design And Development Of Automatic Western Blot Detection And Analysis System

Western Blot experiment is one of the most commonly used experimental methods in biological laboratory,with tedious and time-consuming steps and low reproducibility.Studies have shown that strict procedures and standardized operations are helpful to improve the accuracy of Western Blot experiments.Therefore,automatic Western Blot equipment can obtain accurate experimental results quickly and efficiently.In this paper,the main work and achievements of the development of an automatic Western Blot equipment are as follows:1)Western Blot experimental system was designed and implemented.The hardware part of this system includes three parts: control module,drive module and motors.The control module is a minimum control system based on STM32F103V8T6.The drive module uses TB6600 HG to drive the motor,and the dual-phase stepper motor drives the manipulator arm,peristaltic pump and shaking table.In addition,images of experimental results were collected by CCD camera with gradient exposure mode.2)Western Blot analysis system was designed and implemented.This software is a computer side window application based on Visual Studio and Qt.This software includes format conversion,rotation,flip,clipping,sizing,gray range adjustment,denoising,enhancement and other basic image processing functions.The software also has lane recognition,band recognition,density measurement,molecular weight calculation and other image analysis functions.It also allows users to edit lanes and bands.3)A method of gradient exposure was proposed to collect images of experimental results.Image is optimized by threshold segmentation,and the effect of chemiluminescence intensity decay on the experimental results is avoided by this method.Through the method of trough screening and mathematical morphology processing,the invisible swimming lane can be identified more accurately.4)Relevant experimental parameters were optimized,and the effectiveness of the equipment and the feasibility of ultrasonic and micro-flow control technology to improve the degree of experimental automation wre verified by experiments.