Export As Version 3.0 . . . .
After you have installed Delta2D for the first time on your computer, the initial settings use as working pool the example pool, residing in the directory Delta2D is installed to. Many users use to store the data they are working with in an individual directory structure to have it easy to back up all their important data. It may also be the case that you want to place your data in a network directory to make it accessible for your team. In these cases it is a good advise to create your own pool in the desired place before you start importing and working on your own gel images. How to create a pool is described exactly in section 4.1.
Image processing in general and especially analyzing several images and dealing with all the gained data at once is a memory consuming business. Thus, Delta2D works better and faster, the more memory is available for use. By default, the settings for memory usage are set to a more conservative value, in order to leave enough memory for other applications even on a computer equipped with the minimum of RAM as stated in chapter 3. If your computer has more memory, you can increase the performance of Delta2D by changing the settings for memory in the preferences as described in section 9.9.
The memory needs of Delta2D grow with the size and number of images analyzed at a time in one project. If you encounter a significant lack of performance in a certain project, this could be due to the extraordinary big size of your gel images. In this case you could try to regain performance by setting prescale to a lower value as described in section 5.5.
As in any process, the quality of your product (your results) is directly connected with the quality of your raw material (the gelimages). The more irritations and irrelevant information your images contain, the more Delta2D will be distracted from efficient analysis and more and more corrections by the user will be necessary. You can avoid a lot of trouble by being more accurate with scanning your gel images:
Please review our Scanning Guide to read more about how to produce optimal gel images. Please find it at www.decodon.com/Support/Howto/Scanning/scanning_2D_gels.html.
With version 3.4 and before with version 3.1 of Delta2D the data format used in the pool has changed. Opening pools created with earlier versions (< V 3.0) represents no problem, but the opposite way does not work.
If it still is necessary to work with older versions on a pool which was in use with version 3.1 or
newer, you can export the pool from the newer version of Delta2D in the former format. To do this,
please select Pool Export As Version 3.0 . . . .
In case that you need to work with on of the versions 3.1, 3.2or 3.3 on a pool which was in use with version 3.4 already, please contact us for assistance.
For well scanned gel images, the quantitation parameters chosen by the automatic quantitation process should produce decent results. If this is not the case, you can tune the parameters on your own to optimize the quantitation process in the dialog which will be shown if you start a Quantitation manually in the Gel Image Pair View. The single parameters are described in detail in section 6.3. Here is what to do in which case: