Why Start Fluorescent Western Blotting Now?

By Gunjan Choudhary, Poulomi Acharya, and Raymond Miller

The method of western blotting was first introduced almost 40 years ago. Towbin et al. (1979) presented a method that demonstrated the electrophoretic transfer of ribosomal proteins from a polyacrylamide gel to a nitrocellulose sheet and the detection of those immobilized proteins using radioactively labeled or peroxidase-conjugated antibodies. Western blotting methods have since become a widely utilized method of identifying and quantitating proteins in most life science research labs, but the basic principle has remained fundamentally the same. What has changed is how proteins are detected on a membrane.