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.
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