Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA)

Bovine serum albumin is a well-characterized, large globular protein, also known by its acronym BSA, or Fraction V, which refers to albumin being the fifth fraction of the Edwin Cohn purification method. BSA is used in a wide variety of biochemical applications such as ELISAs, immunoblots, immunohistochemistry, microbial culture, restriction digests, and the Bradford protein assay. BSA is the universally accepted reference protein for total protein quantification. Powdered BSA is available in different grades- reagent, standard, protease-free, heat shock treated, cold ethanol precipitated, and fatty acid-free. Some features to look for in BSA products are purity and plasma that is derived from U.S. origin, healthy animals with traceability.