Celebrating the Western blot

Western blotting has, despite the initial unclear potential and its limitations, matured into an essential biochemical technique. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Western blotting [1]. Briefly, a Western blot is used to detect proteins of interest with antibodies, after the proteins have been separated based on size. Since Western blotting is one of the fundamental BioTechniques, I’m pretty confident that the Western blotting procedure is known to most readers. To a life scientist, Western blotting is probably as familiar as Post-it notes, Pac-Man and GPS are to the general public. Incidentally, all these things have a similar age and turn 40 in 2020.   The name Western blotting was coined by W. Neal Burnette in...