Greener Lab - Better Science?
It's about a new type of Western blot membrane.
This new Western blot membrane is made of polycaprolactone. In other words, something very different from the PVDF or nitrocellulose membranes we normally use.
We'll hear more about this in the talk, but normally, we don't think too much about the membrane once we've decided between PVDF and nitrocellulose.
We just run our Western blot and hope for the best.
And I think we all know that sometimes our membranes don't look quite the way we intended.
The point, though, is that the interaction between your proteins and the membrane is an essential factor that many people overlook.
With polycaprolactone, you can actually combine many of the advantages of PVDF and nitrocellulose.
The advantage is that, in many cases, you can achieve lower background and higher sensitivity.
In some of their trials, this allowed them to see bands that would otherwise have remained hidden.
To make a long story short, I think this is important because it shows that what started as an effort to reduce the environmental impact of membranes ultimately led to better data.
The same thing happened to Mazzali et al., who accidentally switched from DMSO to water as a solvent, increasing their yield.
I experienced something similar myself when I stopped using Parafilm to prepare my microscopy samples, which actually resulted in better tissue integrity.
More about all of that today and tomorrow!
