Yes, you can stain your TBE gels with ethidium bromide, SYBR Green I, SYBR Green II, and the SilverXpress Silver Staining Kit. For ethidium bromide staining, soak the gel in a 2 µg/mL solution of ethidium bromide in ultrapure water for 20 minutes. Destain by rinsing with three successive 10-minute rinses of ultrapure water. Visualize bands under UV light.
If you need to stop in the middle of the SilverQuest or SilverXpress silver staining procedure, at what point should this be done?
The sensitizing step is the optimal point to stop the procedure. The gel can be left overnight in the Sensitizing Solution. Although some other kits recommend leaving gels in the fix step, we have found that overnight fixation diminishes stain performances.
What is the sensitivity of Coomassie staining and silver staining?
Coomassie sensitivity: 50-500 ng protein per band
Silver-staining sensitivity: 1-5 ng protein per band
In general, silver staining is 10-100 times more sensitive than Coomassie staining.
I used the SilverXpress Silver Staining kit and my stained gels are too dark. What went wrong?
Here are possible causes and solutions:
- Stopper not added to the gel at the appropriate time. Be sure to add the stopper slightly before the desired stain intensity is reached.
- Protein is overloaded. Decrease the protein load on the gel.
I used the SilverXpress Silver Staining kit and I see negative staining (a dark halo enclosing a pale area). Can you please help me troubleshoot?
This is usually due to overloading of the protein sample. We recommend decreasing the protein load per band. For an unknown protein, a serial dilution may be necessary to determine the best amount to load for a particular protein.
DNA binding site selection of dimeric and tetrameric Stat5 proteins reveals a large repertoire of divergent tetrameric Stat5a binding sites.
Authors:Soldaini E, John S, Moro S, Bollenbacher J, Schindler U, Leonard WJ
Journal:Mol Cell Biol
PubMed ID:10594041
We have defined the optimal binding sites for Stat5a and Stat5b homodimers and found that they share similar core TTC(T/C)N(G/A)GAA interferon gamma-activated sequence (GAS) motifs. Stat5a tetramers can bind to tandemly linked GAS motifs, but the binding site selection revealed that tetrameric binding also can be seen with a wide ... More