Jaime Renart, Jakob Reiser, and George Stark in Stanford, and by Harry Towbin, Theophil Staehelin, and Julian Gordon at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland. Neal Burnette in 1981, although the method itself was independently invented in 1979 by Similarly, detection of RNA is termed as northern blot. The name western blot is a play on the Southern blot, a technique for DNA detection named after its inventor, English biologist Edwin Southern. Other related techniques include dot blot analysis, quantitative dot blot, immunohistochemistry and immunocytochemistry, where antibodies are used to detect proteins in tissues and cells by immunostaining, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The secondary antibody is visualized through various methods such as staining, immunofluorescence, and radioactivity, allowing indirect detection of the specific target protein. A secondary antibody is added which recognizes and binds to the primary antibody. The electrophoresis membrane is washed in a solution containing the primary antibody, before excess antibody is washed off. A synthetic or animal-derived antibody (known as the primary antibody) is created that recognizes and binds to a specific target protein. Western blot technique uses three elements to achieve its task of separating a specific protein from a complex: separation by size, transfer of protein to a solid support, and marking target protein using a primary and secondary antibody to visualize. Besides detecting the proteins, this technique is also utilized to visualize, distinguish, and quantify the different proteins in a complicated protein combination. The western blot (sometimes called the protein immunoblot), or western blotting, is a widely used analytical technique in molecular biology and immunogenetics to detect specific proteins in a sample of tissue homogenate or extract.

Western blot data analysis