Bio-Rad Negative Stains - Manual (Page 3)

Section 1
Introduction
1.1 Introduction and Principle
The Copper Stain & Destain Kit for Electrophoresis provides a rapid,
reversible visualization of protein bands on a Laemmli SDS-PAGE gel.
The Copper Stain & Destain Kit is modified from a new staining method
developed by Lee et al.
1 It enables the proteins to be quantitatively eluted
from the gel 2 and subsequently used for blotting, 3 as antigens in ELISA, 4
for amino acid sequencing, 5 or for other analyses.
The Copper Stain & Destain Kit offers several advantages over the
traditional methods of Coomassie Brilliant Blue (CBB) or silver staining.
First, the Copper Stain & Destain procedures save time. For a typical
0.75 mm gel, a brief water rinse is followed by a 5 minute incubation
with Copper Stain. The gel is destained within 15 minutes, so this entire
process can be completed in less than 30 minutes. Second, the Copper
Stain & Destain procedures are convenient. Only a simple dilution of the
reagents is required. In addition, the proteins are reversibly fixed within
the gel, so that the polyacrylamide gel can be destained and the proteins
eluted for further study.
The Copper Stain, a negative stain, produces a blue-green opaque
background. The protein bands are visualized against a black surface, and
can be photographed to provide a permanent record, as shown in Figure 1.
1
LIT464B 9/3/98 10:33 AM Page 1