iGel

A tool to reduce the cost of Gel Electrophoresis

Motivation

Gel electrophoresis is a method for separation and analysis of macromolecules (DNA, RNA and proteins) and their fragments, based on their size and charge. It's an essential technique in the modern biologists arsenal. A technique that should be low cost, but because of the inflation of biomedical equipment costs, it can be a bottleneck for departments.

The procedure is complicated but the instruments needed aren't:

• Gel
• Dye
• DNA
• Batteries and wire
• A box with a light
• Camera

The first four items are necessary for performing the technique and come in a kit, which is relatively inexpensive. The box and camera are needed to view the results, and can be $5,000. This is because only a few companies sell the box and camera. They understand that the procedure is useless without the viewing instruments and they pack them with unnecessary features to inflate the cost.

Because of the cost most departments only have one set, which creates a bottle neck on productivity. Most electrophoresis only requires a picture to validate correct samples and the extra features are only necessary for paper-level images. The box just has to be dark box with an LED or UV light an ordinary camera is required!

Solution

To reduce the cost and increase productivity our solution was to design a smaller box for the lab bench that an iphone could be placed in to take the picture. Then use iOS Core Image libraries to process the image. If the gel was to be used in a paper then the more advanced hardware could be used.

Thus iGel was born!

Current State

It's a simple picture archiving app. Here is the flow

1. User opens app
2. User takes a picture or grabs one from the library
3. The user can then add a name, describe it, apply filters to the photo to adjust contrast, color, saturation, gamma (I had a lot of fun with that)
4. Then save the picture to the iphone
5. Saved images could be emailed to the user

Would've Could've Should've

I wrote this app when I was 17 the summer before going to college. I'm really proud of what I was able to build at such a young age and it put me on a path towards software engineering. While porting this to github I looked back on the code with a combination of nostolgia and total disgust. My programming skills have increased unbelievably since this project. If I were to redesign it I would

• Use Coredata to persist data instead of NSCoding and file systems.
• Use constraints to handle different sized screens.
• Have a concept of user.
• Use firebase or some server code to back up the data.
• Make my own logos and have a fun theme where buttons are bands in the gel electrophoresis image.
• Give the user premade filters to choose from.

Life's all about learning!