Integrated protocol for reliable and fast quantification and documentation of electrophoresis gels

•Reliable quantification of electrophoresis gels.•Suitable for agarose- and PAGE-gels and Western blots.•Fully commented and accessible source code.•Implemented for IGOR Pro (Mac and PC).

Quantitative analysis of electrophoresis gels is an important part in molecular cloning, as well as in protein expression and purification. Parallel quantifications in yield and purity can be most conveniently obtained from densitometric analysis. This communication reports a comprehensive, reliable and simple protocol for gel quantification and documentation, applicable for single samples and with special features for protein expression screens. As major component of the protocol, the fully annotated code of a proprietary open source computer program for semi-automatic densitometric quantification of digitized electrophoresis gels is disclosed. The program (“GelQuant”) is implemented for the C-based macro-language of the widespread integrated development environment of IGOR Pro.