What is the program for?

The ultrastructural localization of various antigens in a cell using antibodies conjugated to gold particles is a powerful instrument in biological research. However, statistical or stereological tools for testing the observed immunogold labelling patterns for significant clustering or colocalization are missing.

The program which you can download here free of charge will help you to evaluate quantitatively single or multiple immunogold labelling patterns. The method on which this program is based was described in our paper:

Philimonenko A. A., Janacek J., and Hozak P.
Statistical Evaluation of Colocalization Patterns in Immunogold Labelling Experiments.
J. Struct. Biol., Vol. 132, No. 3, December 2000, pp. 201-210; abstract

The method allows detection of clustering or colocalization of gold particles using various characteristics of the distribution of distances between them (see Theoretical Background for details).

We hope that the program will be a powerful tool in biological investigations for testing the statistical significance of observed clustering or colocalization patterns in immunogold labelling experiments and a good addition for the image analisys software which accompanies most of the modern CCD cameras for electrone microscopes.

Please send all suggestions or questions to gold-software@img.cas.cz.