BACKGROUND Alveolar macrophages from patients with sarcoidosis express increased quantities of HLA-DR during activation. Because silver staining has been described as a sensitive indicator of cellular activity a study was performed to examine whether it relates to HLA-DR antigen expression. METHODS The relation between silver staining patterns of nucleoli and HLA-DR antigen expression was exa...

Proteins from silver-stained gels can be digested enzymatically and the resulting peptides analyzed and sequenced by mass spectrometry. Standard proteins yield the same peptide maps when extracted from Coomassieand silver-stained gels, as judged by electrospray and MALDI mass spectrometry. The low nanogram range can be reached by the protocols described here, and the method is robust. A silver-...

Silver staining of nucleic acid has been widely used in molecular marker analysis such as simple sequence repeat (SSR), single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP), and amplified fragment-length polymorphism (AFLP). Many alternatives to silver staining methods have been described, but these methods are not efficient or cost-effective. Here we report a silver staining method that requires les...

Protein detection methods after electrophoresis have to be sensitive, homogeneous, and not to impair downstream analysis of proteins by MS. Speed, low cost, and user friendliness are also favored features. Silver staining combines many of these features, but its compatibility with MS is limited. We describe here, a new variant of silver staining that is completely formaldehyde-free. Reducing su...

Secondary wall thickenings in tracheary elements were specifically stained by incubation of Arabidopsis and maize in Silver Stain Plus (Bio-Rad) staining solution, after pretreatment with SDS and ethanol solution. Scanning electron microscopic analysis of sections of celery revealed that silver particles were deposited on the secondary wall thickenings, indicating that the staining was due to t...