Easy Transfer of Your Traditional Western Blot to Wes

The Western blot has been around in essentially the same form since the late 1970s. A proteomics workhorse, Westerns are a key part of protein analysis in many labs. That said, the continuous manual intervention to run a Western blot is labor intensive and introduces many opportunities for error.

Wes™ builds on over a decade of Simple Western development and makes running a Western even more simple. Wes eliminates all the repetitive processing by automating all manual processes. Loading the “gel”, monitoring the separation, “blotting”, blocking, antibody incubations, washing, detection and even analysis of data is all done automatically. Assay kits come with a pre-filled microplate, so the only reagents you need to pipette are your samples, your antibodies, and your molecular weight ladder, everything else needed to run the assay is already in the plate. Wes also uses a capillary cartridge that is fully self-contained and stores all assay waste inside. At the end of the run, just toss the used plate and cartridge and you’re done. The Compass software used to run Wes also allows you to run standard curves and back-calculate protein quantitation values for unknown samples. Wes not only gives you a fully automated instrument to run your Westerns on for up to 24 samples (plus a molecular weight ladder), he also gives you more from that data than ever before.

So, how do you design an assay for your protein of interest? Read our application note to learn how you can easily transfer your traditional Western blot protocols to our Wes platform using the protein kinase AKT as an example.