Bio-Rad’s New ChemiDoc™ Touch Imaging System Surpasses Film’s Performance, Simplifies Western Blot Detection

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. has announced the launch of its ChemiDoc Touch Imaging System. This system is a significant advance in chemiluminescent western blot detection, surpassing the performance of film and the convenience of other digital imaging systems.

Until now, digital imaging systems failed to deliver the sensitivity and resolution of film. The new ChemiDoc Touch System, however, allows detection of faint bands missed by film and produces publication-quality images

The ChemiDoc Touch outperforms film in other ways as well. When using film to image abundant proteins, strong bands quickly saturate and become unquantifiable. Saturated bands can also obscure the signal from adjacent faint bands, making western blotting with film challenging. The ChemiDoc Touch addresses these issues through its wide dynamic range, which permits easy and reliable quantification even of highly abundant proteins, and through the instrument’s ability to optimize exposure for each protein of interest.

Dr. Ernesto Diaz-Flores, Ph.D., an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) conducted early tests on the Bio-Rad product. Dr. Diaz-Flores used the imager to simultaneously measure protein expression level changes of up to 30 different proteins in samples from leukemia patients to understand how gene mutations alter protein pathways that might represent novel therapeutic targets.

“My goal in collaborating on this project with Bio-Rad was to help develop the next generation technology required to advance protein quantification analysis and their impact in research, said Dr. Diaz-Flores. “We found that the technology outperformed film and other imaging technologies as it allows us to simultaneously visualize and quantitate both high and low expression proteins in a matter of seconds. It also allowed us to determine fold induction or protein reduction in high resolution and correlate these levels to drug response in multiple protein assays in a time efficient manner.”

Capturing images with the ChemiDoc Touch is easy. Unlike the often sluggish response of other imagers, the ChemiDoc Touch offers a smooth, intuitive user experience that makes capturing, reviewing, selecting, and exporting images efficient and straightforward.

The imager also allows stain-free imaging, a technology exclusive to Bio-Rad. Using the stain-free enabled V3 Western Workflow™, researchers can quickly determine whether their western blot is proceeding as planned using the imager at multiple built-in checkpoints. Researchers can also use stain-free technology to perform total protein normalization for easier and more reliable protein quantification.