Requirements:

  1. Image Format: 8-bit grayscale or 24-bit color image in windows bitmap (BMP) format
    If your camera captures in a format other than BMP, you’ll first have to convert your image data.
  2. Comet Orientation : strictly horizontal, left-to-right and right-to-left
    If your comet orientation is not horizontal, the best solution is to rotate your camera before acquisition. If that is not possible, you can rotate your image with a third-party image editor. Rotation using an angle other than 90, 180, or 270 degrees will introduce interpolation and error.

Image manipulation can be accomplished in many third-party software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, Jasc PaintShopPro, Corel photo paint, and the “crown jewel of the open-source community”, the GIMP.

CometScore™ is a stand-alone software package for scoring comets produced by the single cell gel electrophoresis process.Simply capture an image of properly focused and illuminated comets from the microscope camera and open that image with the CometScore™.
Use the cutoff bar to separate the comets from the background.

Click and drag a rectangle around each comet and designate the head with a second click. The score appears in the status bar and is exported to a spreadsheet-ready file.

Several viewing options are available, including hue alteration of the field and full spectrum which increases color variance sensitivity by six times that of normal monochrome viewing.

Choose between 17 different metrics to score each comet, including Tail Length, Tail Area, %DNA in the Tail, Tail Moment, and Olive Tail Moment.Selective viewing and exporting is accomplished with standard checkboxes.

After all fields have been scored, the data can be viewed in virtually any third-party spreadsheet software package.

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