W. Neal Burnette

W. Neal Burnette (born 1944 in New York State ) is an American biochemist. He is considered to be one of the inventors of the western blot method.

Burnette was the son of a United States Air Force pilot and grew up in Texas . He studied theater at Texas Christian University and then switched to biology and chemistry, received a master's degree in bioorganic chemistry from the University of Central Missouri, and received his PhD from Vanderbilt University with a dissertation on retroviruses under William Mitchell. As a post-doctoral student he was at Albert Einstein College of Medicine with J. Thomas August and with Robert Nowinski at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle .

There he developed the Western blot method in 1979. This happened independently in the group of George Stark at Stanford. Burnette called the method based on the Southern Blot ( Edwin Southern 1975) and the Northern Blot (James Alwine, David Kemp, George Stark 1977) the Western Blot, since his laboratory was in Seattle on the west coast. His work was initially rejected by the journal Analytical Biochemistry (1979) and only appeared in the same journal two years later (1981). By now, Burnette's discovery had spread through preprints and personal communication.

Burnette was at the Salk Institute and in the early 1980s at Applied Molecular Genetics in Thousand Oaks, California, soon known as Amgen , where he worked on the creation of vaccines using recombinant DNA techniques. When he left Amgen in 1992, he was financially independent thanks to stock options. He was still in the management of a number of other smaller biotechnology companies and worked for the US Army after 9/11 as a specialist in (terrorist) threats from infectious diseases and responsible for the supply of vaccines, for example against anthrax and smallpox. For this he was reactivated from his position as reserve officer and was most recently a colonel. He lives in Chapel Hill , North Carolina .

Fonts

• "Western blotting": electrophoretic transfer of proteins from sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels to unmodified nitrocellulose and radiographic detection with antibody and radioiodinated protein A. In: Analytical Biochemistry. Vol. 112, No. 2, 1981, doi: 10.1016 / 0003-2697 (81) 90281-5 , pp. 195-203
  • W. Neal Burnette: This Week's Citation Classic: Western blotting. In: Science Citation Classics. No. 44, November 4, 1991, p. 8 ( PDF )

literature

• Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay: W. Neal Burnette: the man behind the Western Blot . In: ASBMB Today. January 2012

Footnotes

1. ↑ Harry Towbin, Theophil Staehelin & Julian Gordon: Electrophoretic transfer of proteins from polyacrylamide gels to nitrocellulose sheets: procedure and some applications. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Vol. 76, no. 9, September 1979, pp. 4350-4354 ( PDF )