Multiple immunoblots after non-electrophoretic bidirectional transfer of a single SDS-PAGE gel with multiple antigens.

Western blotting is a very sensitive and powerful fundamental technique in immunology that has been used to detect and characterize proteins of low abundance. This technique employs the transfer of proteins separated on SDS-PAGE to nitrocellulose sheets for further detection using antibodies. Here we report the non-electrophoretic transfer of the 60-kDa Ro (or SSA) autoantigen, 240 and 220 kDa spectrin antigens and prestained molecular weight standards from SDS-PAGE gels to nitrocellulose to obtain multiple immunoblots. In fact, we have used this procedure to obtain 12 immunoblots from a single gel with multiple sera.