What is immunoprecipitation?

Question

Immunoprecipitation is a very common lab technique used to study cells. What is it, what does it do, and how?

Answer 1

Immunoprecipitation is the process of using an antibody to enrich a solution for a particular protein of interest. This is often followed by gel electrophoresis (usually Western blotting) which can then detect them by probing for a particular marker.

This is really useful if

a) you are looking for a protein that is present in a low concentration and

b) it is present with a lot of other stuff you're not interested in.

For example, if you have a cell lysate (a lysate is basically finely chopped up cells) and want to detect the presence of a particular protein.