What is the main application of Western Blotting in clinical diagnostics?

The main application of Western Blotting in clinical diagnostics is disease diagnosis through protein detection. This technique is widely used to identify specific proteins in a sample, which are often indicative of various medical conditions. For example, Western Blotting is crucial in the diagnosis of infectious diseases like HIV, where the presence of certain viral proteins can confirm infection.

In addition to infectious diseases, Western Blotting can also be applied to detect autoantibodies in autoimmune disorders, as these antibodies target specific proteins in the body. The method is characterized by its specificity and ability to provide detailed information about protein expression, making it an important tool in the clinic for diagnosing diseases based on protein markers rather than nucleic acid levels or gene mutations.

Other techniques serve different roles in molecular biology; for instance, the detection of RNA levels aligns more closely with techniques such as RT-PCR. Cancer gene identification typically involves methods like sequencing or other genomic techniques rather than protein detection. Virus quantification is adeptly addressed by techniques like quantitative PCR instead of Western Blotting, which focuses on proteins rather than viral RNA or DNA.