Why is western blot better than elisa?
1 Answer
I would argue that a western blot is not better than ELISA as they are designed to do different things.
Explanation:
The results from an ELISA are quantifiable, that is, when the experiment is finished you have a long list of numbers that tell you the concentration (or presence or absence) of an antigen. However, an ELISA may lack specificity in that you cannot be sure that the antibody is binding to the right protein. (You can control for this if you design the ELISA correctly.)
A Western blot is not truly quantifiable (you can get some "ballpark" figures from it such as there is twice as much antigen present in one sample compared to another), but what it lacks in terms of quantification it makes up for its specificity. That is, you can see the protein to which the antibody is binding and if it's of the correct molecular weight you can be fairly confident that the antibody is binding to the correct protein.
