Towards design and comparison of World Wide Web-accessible myocardial two-dimensional gel electrophoresis protein databases.

In addition to the recently published HEART-2DPAGE--a myocardial World Wide Web-accessible 2-DE gel protein database--the usage and installation of software tools are described with regard to the hard- and software environments. Further, access to the HEART-2DPAGE from other two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) databases using name or accession code of a protein is now available. Moreover, database images, published in the myocardial HSC-2DPAGE and HEART-2DPAGE databases are compared. Using the warping tool of the common image processing system Khoros the database images are matched and added in order to visualize the effects of warping. The application of such image processing tools is aimed at improving the comparability of protein spot patterns of different gel images available through the net.