From my experience with Simon from Protein Simple I can say that the resolution is definitely better than with regular liquid WB. But it has one big problem, the reproducibility of the mobility of the same preparation from lane to lane is not very good. I spent some time to understand that, and it looks like this problem is linked with the automatic calculation of the internal MW markers mobilities (which should be loaded in each lane). Therefore, the mobility image of your protein directly depends on this calculation. The kit is kind of expensive if compared to reagents for regular WB. But the time consuming is much shorter, instead of 1.5 days for regular WB it takes only about 5 hours. 

I work in the same lab as Viktor so I thought I'd give you some numbers. As Viktor pointed out the resolution of the instrument is better than WB. We routinely blot with 3 ug of protein to image our glycoprotein of interest, while we had success with Simon down to around 200 ng before signal to noise was a problem, so about 10X more resolution. Cost per run is $120, and you must run all 12 lanes, 11 of which are sample lanes, so about $11 per sample. Quantitation of protein is quite easy as the software delivers a view resembling a chromatogram and calculates peak area. One other area of concern is that some Abs that work in traditional WB might not work in the Simon system, so before considering a purchase I would definitely test your Ab to see if it works in a capillary electrophoresis instrument. 

Hi Jean Pierre,

as the others pointed out already the per sample cost is quite high. Also you have to pay that amount for each stain and do all the pipetting for each stain again, so that's where you lose all the time-saving you got before, by not doing gel/membrane stuff.

We decided against this system, as we do a lot lot of WB in the lab and also stain one membrane several times in a row or cut it to pieces for staining.

So if you want this one great WB(ish readout) once in a while the capillary systems are great. If you do more stains for one experiment and want/need to be more cost efficient and (in my opinion also time saving with less pipetting) you may want to stick with traditional WB.

To be fair, multiplexing several ABs in one capillary run is also possible but needs to be established for each combination.

Hope that helps

Thank you veryu much for sparing some time to share this information with me....it was very useful. All the very best to you all. !!!!