Congratulations on your acquisition of NCSA GelReader 2.0 for the Macintosh! NCSA GelReader is a product designed to automate to some degree the measurement of DNA length using digitized electrophoretic gels. First, a digitized gel image is read into GelReader, and displayed as an image. GelReader has the capability to find the lanes and the bands in the gel. Lanes and bands can be interactively added and deleted if necessary. Then, known molecular weights (standards) can be used to approximate the molecular weight of the remaining molecules. The result is a text report listing the approximated molecular weights of the molecules. To get started, you will need to open the UnStuffit application to decompress the GelReader application, documentation, and sample files. NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 2.0 This version has been completely rewriten, and now provides a much more intuitive user interface. Creating, deleting and editing standards is now much easier, and assigning standards to lanes in a gel has been greatly improved. Profiles now appear in the same window with the gel. You may superimpose several profiles in the same view. You can also save a gel file, its' lanes and bands and its notebook into an HDF file. When you open the HDF file again, you will see all the lanes and bands that were there when you saved it, and the notebook will still be intact. Multiplexing is also supported now. You can run standards and unknowns in the same lane, probe for the knowns and generate the image, then probe for the unknowns and generate a separate image. The results of the analysis of the image with the knowns can then be superimposed onto the image with the unknowns. And much, much more. FIXES IN 2.0.2: 1) There was a bug that would cause the program to crash whenever you manually added more than one lane. Fixed! 2) It no longer reports standards. 3) It would sometimes report than the program was out of memory when using the copy lanes command. Fixed. 4) It no longer crashes when you try to generate a report and you have unknowns above internal controls (knows imbedded in the lane. 5) Computations for unknowns outside of the range of the knowns are still less accurate, but tend to be much more reasonable now, and the fact that these computation are less accurate are flagged in the report. Thomas Redman Project Leader