“…the few preprints I had sent to colleagues seemed to have undergone logarithmic Xerox multiplication. It happened because researchers, besides being interested in the technique itself, were tickled enough by its quirky name to make copies and send it to their friends.

It happened through the sense of humor of the researchers who were doing the work, through people power (assisted by Xerox power). The reviewers hated it, they hated the name even more – obviously humor was not high on their agenda – and the manuscript was rejected.īut despite this, the popularisation of Burnette’s technique, and particularly the name “western blot” still happened even without the assistance of the literary establishment. Unfortunately for Burnette no sooner had he perfected his technique than a paper describing a very similar method, also inspired by nothern blotting, was published by Towbin et al working at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland (see here for the reference and here for Towbin’s account of events).īurnette was dejected, but nonetheless, convinced that his methodology was sufficiently different to Towbin’s, he decided to submit a manuscript on his western blot method to the Analytical Biochemistry journal. Try pulling your boss up on that one next time he is in mid-flow talking about a “Northern blot” in a departmental presentation.Īnyway, back to our story. Note that among these techniques, only the Southern blot should be capitalised since it refers to Southern’s name, the others – nothern, western etc – are not proper nouns, so should not be capitalised. So if the Nowinski lab had been in New York, we would all be doing “eastern” blots.Ī quick aside for the pedants among us. Like nothern blotting, “western blot” was also an allusion to the Southern and nothern techniques, but Burnette had upped the ante by throwing in a geographical reference to location of the Nowinski lab. In a historic, but mostly forgotten conversation with Nowinski, Burnette coined the name “western blot” for his technique. So he developed the method of using electrophoresis to blot the protein onto nitrocellulose paper and after some further work, perfected the technique of blocking non-specific binding sites and visualising the specific radioimmunolabelled antigens using an X-Ray film. Neal Burnette, a post-doc working in the Nowinski group at the Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, started the real fun.īurnette was searching for a way to combine the powers of radio immunoassay and SDS-PAGE electrophoresis so that he could pinpoint specific antigens in a complex protein mixture, such as a cell extract.Īfter some “laughably naive” (his own words – see t his great account by Burnette himself) attempts to visualise the interaction between antibodies and the separated proteins in the gels, he was inspired by Alwine’s nothern blot method (so indirectly by the Southern blot) to make a solid phase replica of the gel. Alwine couldn’t resist the temptation to call his technique the northern blot in an allusion to Southern’s technique, raising a chuckles in labs everywhere. Alwine, a biologist with a sense of humor, developed a technique analogous to the Southern blot, this time for the identification of a specific RNA within a complex RNA sample using a radio-labelled DNA probe. a fractionated genome) and named it after himself – the Southern blot – I’m sure that he had no idea about what he had started. In 1975 when Ed Southern invented his method of using a radiolabeled DNA probe to detect a specific DNA sequence within a DNA sample (e.g. Read on to find out the story of how the Southern, northern and western (etc) blots got their names. It’s a story of discovery, comedy and the triumph of people power over the establishment. This is the story of how one of the most famous and quirky naming conventions in biology came into being. It’s official – biologists DO have a sense of humor, well some of them at least.

Southern northern western blot