Identification of relative protein bands in polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) using multiresolution snake algorithm

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) is one of the most widely used techniques in protein research. In the protein purification process, it is important to determine the efficiency of each purification step in terms of percentage of protein of interest found in the protein mixture. This study provides a rapid and reliable way to determine this percentage. The region of interest containing the protein is detected using the snake algorithm. The iterative snake algorithm is implemented in a multiresolutional framework. The snake is initialized on a low resolution image. Then, the final position of the snake at low resolution is used as the initial position in the higher resolution image. Finally, the area of the protein is estimated as the area enclosed by the final position of the snake.