Silver staining gels - the biochemistry of how it works

Silver staining is kinda like being a talent scout & agent for D-list celebrities. You want to find them & make them shine. With a silver stain we can make tiny amounts of protein shine - literally! All it takes is a coat of silver (on the protein not the box….) SILVER STAINING is a sensitive all-protein stain that lets you find invisible proteins trapped in a gel. It’s not as popular as Coomassie, but when it comes to tiny amounts of protein, silver staining does the job more well (pictures English teachers cringing - sorry!) blog with full text: https://bit.ly/silver_staining When I say sensitive, I mean it. It’s ~50X as sensitive as coomassie-based stains, able to detect as tiny an amount as 0.25 ng of protein! (that’s 25-quadrillionths of a gram). Note: silver stain can also be used to stain for nucleic acids & in some histology stuff - I'm focusing on staining protein gels, but the same principles apply for the most part note 2: in the video and in-depth discussion I discuss