If you were born before 1985, you might remember going to the store and buying CDs when you wanted to hear a piece of music. It was tough to share or remix the songs, the CDs could get scratched over time, and it was difficult to keep track of growing collections of music. I ...
You’ve gotten the plasmid encoding your protein of interest from Addgene, transfected it into your target cells, now what? How can you tell if the protein you are so keen to study is expressing in your cells? Immunoblotting or simply the western blot, or western, is one of the ...
You may have heard the term antibody tossed around in the news or in the lab. But what exactly is an antibody, and how is a component of the immune system useful as a research reagent? Let’s find out!
Nanobodies from camelids have gotten a lot of press for being a promising approach for treatment or prophylaxis of COVID-19. Researchers identified nanobodies that bind to coronavirus spike proteins (Wrapp et al., 2020), which sit on the surface of coronaviruses and enable the ...
It’s time to choose your own protein purification adventure. You want to purify your favorite protein (YFP). You have two options: Option #1: Affinity tag purification You tag YFP and use an affinity column for purification. After binding YFP to the column, you wash several ...
Western blots. ELISAs. Immunofluorescence. What do all of these techniques have in common? They all typically require secondary antibodies, frequently of the mouse or rabbit variety. While antibodies certainly aren’t “broken,” their production does require continued animal ...
