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Updated: May 19, 2026

V3 Stain-free Workflow for a Practical, Convenient, and Reliable Total Protein Loading Control in Western Blotting
Published on: December 30, 2013
Comparison of Stain-Free gels with traditional immunoblot loading control methodology
Alex D Colella1, Nusha Chegenii, Melinda N Tea
1Department of Ophthalmology, Flinders University, Bedford Park, SA 5042, Australia. alex.colella@flinders.edu.au
Abstract:
Loading controls are necessary for semiquantitative Western blotting to compensate for loading errors. Loading control methods include the reprobing of membranes with an antibody against a constitutively expressed protein or staining the membrane with a total protein stain. We compared the loading control performance of recently released Stain-Free (SF) gels with Sypro Ruby (SR) and reprobing using β-actin. SF gels demonstrated superior performance in that they were faster, required fewer steps and consumables, and allowed the quality of electrophoresis and Western transfer to be assessed before committing to costly and time-consuming Western blots.
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