Computer assisted microdensitometric analysis of footprinting autoradiographic DATA.

A system comprised of a linear scanning microdensitometer interfaced to a personal computer has been developed to facilitate analysis of ligand-DNA footprinting autoradiograms. The system, which can be used to record density and sequence information from autoradiographic films, enables the user to relate the area under an autoradiographic band to the concentration of radiolabeled molecules present in the electrophoresis gel. This report describes the computer program which performs the calculations and discusses the ability of the system to accurately determine oligonucleotide concentration, as a function of band separation, photographic response, and the computational algorithm used to calculate band areas.