Numerical approaches for quantitative analysis of two-dimensional maps: a review of commercial software and home-made systems

The present review attempts to cover a number of methods that have appeared in the last few years for performing quantitative proteome analysis. However, due to the large number of methods described for both electrophoretic and chromatographic approaches, we have limited this review to conventional two-dimensional (2-D) map analysis which couples orthogonally a charge-based step (isoelectric focusing) to a size-based separation step (sodium dodecyl sulfate-electrophoresis). The first and oldest method applied to 2-D map data reduction is based on statistical analysis performed on sets of gels via powerful software packages, such as Melanie, PDQuest, Z3 and Z4000, Phoretix and Progenesis. This method calls for separately running a number of replicas for control and treated samples. The two sets of data are then merged and compared via a number of software packages which we describe. In addition to commercially-available systems, a number of home made approaches for 2-D map comparison have been recently described and are also reviewed. They are based on fuzzyfication of the digitized 2-D gel image coupled to linear discriminant analysis, three-way principal component analysis or a combination of principal component analysis and soft-independent modeling of class analogy. These statistical tools appear to perform well in differential proteomic studies.