Tutorial for Progenesis SpotCheck

Using this tutorial, you will learn how to use the SpotCheck workflow in Progenesis SameSpots to measure the consistency of gel-running within your lab.

Before you start…

For this tutorial, we will use two sets of gel images, all captured from gels containing the same sample:

• A collection of gel images that represents our lab's gold standard i.e. gels that are of the quality that we want to maintain.
• A pair of gel images whose gel-running we want to compare to our gold standard.

All images can be downloaded in a single installation file here:

SpotCheck Tutorial.exe (15MB)

Once downloaded, run the installation to copy the images onto your PC (make a note of the folder you choose, as we'll need it later). The chosen folder will then contain a pair of subfolders, named Gold standard and Test images. These contain the images we'll use in the following steps.

Getting started

To begin our analysis, launch Progenesis SameSpots from the Windows Start menu and click on the SpotCheck quality control tab. From here, we can see the overall process used by SpotCheck to assess the quality of our gel-running:

1. Create and analyse a SameSpots experiment containing the images that define the level of quality we want to maintain.
2. Convert this experiment to a SpotCheck gold standard, specifying pass criteria for further gels.
3. Compare further gels to the gold standard to check that our gel-running is still of a high quality.

Remember: when using SpotCheck, we're not interested in identifying proteins; we're only interested in assessing how well we're running our gels.

So, let's get started with the first step…