Western blot (immunoblot) quantification · Early access

Western blots, quantified the way the method requires.

Blotto measures each band as a slope across your exposure series — within its linear range, with saturated points excluded — so the number reflects how much protein is there, not which exposure you happened to pick.

You place the lanes and bands; the measurement that scores them is identical for every analyst. The calculation shown on every export.

Independent of any imaging vendor — one workflow for whatever hardware your lab runs.

Images are analyzed in your browser and never uploaded.

Got it — we'll be in touch personally. You can also reach us at nathan@leftbrainconsult.com.

We open access lab by lab. Request a code and we'll reach out personally — no automated sequences. When your slot opens, you'll have 14 days of full access to run your own blots.

The problem

Quantification is the part no one can check.

Western blots — immunoblots, more formally — are now held to a quantitative standard the analysis step was never built to meet, and the field knows it. A large share of published blots don't reproduce, journals increasingly treat densitometry with suspicion, and reviewers ask for the raw data behind a number. Yet in most labs the analysis is still taught hand to hand, one trainee to the next, and each pass tends to lose a detail. The PI sees finished figures and has to trust the work underneath them — right up until a reviewer asks how a band was measured, and there's no record to point to.

01

Two people ran the same blot and got different numbers. The afternoon went to working out why.

02

A reviewer asked how you handled background and saturation. The methods section didn't really answer it.

03

A new student needed three weeks to learn a quantification workflow that was never fully written down.

How it works

One path, from images to defensible numbers.

You decide where to look and what the result means. Blotto does the measuring — the same way, every time — and shows its work.

01
Load your exposure series
Drop in the bracketed exposures of a single blot. Blotto reads the acquisition metadata — exposure time, sensor ceiling, dimensions — directly from the file rather than guessing at it.
02
Confirm lanes and bands
Automatic lane and band detection that you review and correct, with an editable lane count and outer-lane anchoring. You target; Blotto measures. Nothing is finalized without your confirmation.
03
Slope across the linear range
For each band, Blotto fits intensity against exposure duration, keeps only the linear range, and excludes points that saturate against the sensor ceiling. The slope is the quantity — and it stays comparable across strong and weak bands on the same blot, where no single exposure captures both well.
04
Export with the calculation shown
Per-band numbers as CSV, alongside the chart that shows the fit, the range used, and the points it left out. If a reviewer asks how you measured, you hand them the file.

Step 3, made visible — the fit Blotto draws across the exposure series, with the saturated points it leaves out:

Export preview · per-band results, with the steps behind each numberdownloads as CSV
LaneBandSlopeLinear rangePoints usedStatus
11142.7exp 1–44linear
1238.4exp 3–64linear
21291.0exp 1–332 points excluded — ceiling
Why it holds up

Standardized, and shown — not asserted.

Blotto's measurement is anchored to the approach the field increasingly treats as the rigorous one — quantify within the linear range, fit a slope across a dilution or exposure series, with recognized background subtraction — computed on the full-bit-depth data, never the image on your screen. It runs identically for every analyst and every blot, on whatever imager produced the file, and every number arrives with the steps that produced it.

And because Blotto isn't sold by the company that made your imager or your reagents, the analysis isn't grading its own homework.

That's the difference between a number a reviewer has to trust and one they can check.

Plainly

What Blotto is — and isn't.

What it isn't
A general image-analysis toolkit. Blotto does one job: defensible blot quantification.
A normalization tool. Blotto gives you per-band numbers; how you normalize is your analysis.
A hands-off black box. You place and confirm the lanes and bands — Blotto doesn't decide them for you.
Validated for clinical or diagnostic use.
What it is
+A standardization and documentation layer for the measurement itself.
+You set the targets; the math that turns them into numbers is identical for every analyst and every blot.
+Independent of any imaging vendor — one workflow across whatever hardware your lab runs.
+Measured on the true data, with every step shown — and your targeting recorded alongside it.
+Browser-based. Your images stay on your machine.
Where we are

We're validating accuracy before we claim it.

A more elaborate method can be more wrong while looking more rigorous. The only honest test is to measure known ratios — a dilution series at 1×, 2×, 4×, 8× — and check that the tool recovers them. That's the same dilution-series logic the field points to as the standard for quantitative blotting, and we hold our own method to it before claiming anything.

We're running that validation now, with a small number of independent labs. Until it's done, we make no best-in-class accuracy claim. What's real today is standardization, transparency, and a defensible record — worth having on their own, whatever the accuracy work returns.

Run your blots the right way — with a record that holds up.

Early access is free and opens lab by lab. Request a code; when your slot opens you'll have 14 days of full access to run your own blots.

Got it — we'll be in touch personally. You can also reach us at nathan@leftbrainconsult.com.

We reach out personally. No automated sequences.