Automated System for Image Analysis of Yeast Colonies: A Novel Application in Functional Genomics

An automated image analysis system has been implemented for a novel genomics application. The biologists are interested in exploring the effect of various drugs on functionality of genes. Study of size change in drug treated colonies of yeast, implies information about those gene pathways that are affected by the drug. The role of developed system is to distinguish and extract true yeast colonies from other objects in a digital image, accurately measure their area, and provide a coordinate oriented map of colony areas. The developed system also executes post processing calculations and presents useful statistical parameters associated with corresponding colony pairs. A precision test is designed to monitor the precision of experimentation trials. Image processing techniques such as spatial adjustments, segmentation and region growing are utilized in development of system. Preliminary results show robustness and significant improvement of this system over conventional methods