Western Blotting by Thin-Film Direct Coating

Abstract

A novel thin-film direct coating (TDC) technique was developed to markedly reduce the amount of antibody required for Western blotting (WB). Automatic application of the technique for a few seconds easily and homogeneously coats the specific primary antibody on the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane. While conventional WB requires 0.4 μg of the primary antibody, the proposed technique only uses 4 × 10^–2 μg, which can be reduced further to 4 × 10^–5 μg by reducing the coater width. Moreover, the proposed process reduces antibody probing times from 60 to 10 min. The quantification capability of TDC WB showed high linearity within a 4-log₂ dynamic range for detecting target antigen glutathione-S-transferase. Furthermore, TDC WB can specifically detect the extrinsic glutathione-S-transferase added in the <i>Escherichia coli</i> or 293T cell lysate with better staining sensitivity than conventional WB. TDC WB can also clearly probe the intrinsic β-actin, α-tubulin, and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase, which are usually used as control proteins in biological experiments. This novel technique has been shown to not only have valuable potential for increasing WB efficiency but also for providing significant material savings for future biomedical applications