title: A public domain image-analysis program for the single-cell gel-electrophoresis (comet) assay.
abstract: The single-cell gel electrophoresis (or comet) assay has gained widespread acceptance as a cheap and simple genotoxicity test, but it requires a computer-assisted image-analysis system. As commercial programs are expensive and inflexible, we decided to develop an image-analysis system based on public domain programs and make it publicly available for the scientific community. Our system is based on the scientific image-processing program NIH Image, and was written in its Pascal-like macro language. User interaction was kept as simple as possible, to enable the measurement of a large number of cells with a few keystrokes. Therefore, the time for image analysis is very low, even on slow computers. The comet macro can be obtained from http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/christoph.helma++ +/comet/, NIH Image is available at http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/. Both programs are free of charge.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cancer Research, Borschkegasse 8a, A-1090, Vienna, Austria. helma@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Helma
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Uhl
mesh_terms: D020552:Comet Assay / Q000379:methods*; D004247:DNA / Q000032:analysis / Q000235:genetics; D004249:DNA Damage; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D004247:DNA