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They have all published papers where authors write Western blot and those where authors write western blot.

I browsed some recent papers in a few journals: Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, Science Advances, and PLOS Biology. Journals don’t specify how you should write this in their author guidelines. Other people argue that since there is not a real person named Western associated with this technique, western is not a proper noun and should be treated as a regular word. If not, the word western means a geographic direction, which would not make sense here.

Inspired by the Southern blot technique, scientists later developed the methods of detecting specific RNAs and proteins, and humorously named them northern blot and western blot, respectively.īecause Southern is capitalized, some people argue that western blot should follow the same convention, so western should always be capitalized. Therefore, Southern is a proper noun in this term and is always capitalized when you write Southern blot. The technique Southern blot, which detects specific DNAs, was named after the scientist who first developed this method, Edwin Southern. There is no doubt how the term came to be.

There are people who strongly believe that we should always write Western blot, and there are also people who strongly believe that the term should be written as western blot except at the beginning of a sentence. Have you ever wondered what the correct way to write the term western blot is? That is, should we capitalize western when the term appears in the middle of a sentence? As it turns out, there is no consensus on this matter.