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From 2012.igem.org

Gene Expression Measurement by FANCY

Abstract

The quantitative measurement of gene expression levels is of great importance in the research of molecule biology, but existing measuring methods are either semi-quantitative (Western Blotting) or require costly instruments and agents (Flow Cytometry). We invent a novel quantitative and inexpensive method, FANCY, which is short for Fluorescent ANalysis of CYtoimaging and based on cell fluorescence imaging and Support Vector Machine, to measure the gene expression in our project. FANCY contains three sub-programme: FANCYSelector to select single cells manually and calculate their properties, FANCYTrainer to train an SVM, and FANCYScanner to identify single cells by SVM trained by FANCYTrainer. The application of FANCY to 5 typical images proves the effectiveness and the error rate is acceptable. All our programs are freely available online and we suggest FANCY more widely applied in iGEM and other further researches.