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Comment by persedes

9 hours ago

Doing a western blot right takes a bit of practice and there are a couple failure modes you need to watch out for. Stuff like background "noise", smears, drifts can make it hard to get binary decision out of your experiment. E.g. antibodies are usually very very specific, but they can have impurities, unspecific bindings to other proteins etc which make interpretation harder. If they remove these from the advertised images you'll have a hard time comparing your own results to them. ESPECIALLY if they remove whole bands from the gel picture, which imho should be very much verboten.

Typically these catalogues have some numbers with regards to the antibodies binding affinity / impurities so you can have a general idea of what to expect, but having a clean image might mislead you into thinking that you did something wrong in your own setup. Seeing how wide spread it is, it's easy to imagine that their own lab is not run very "cleanly" and they have antibody contaminations in their gels, or issues with their own protocol that they're trying to edit out. Doubt that's the case, but it's really not a good look.