When you need results quickly, E-Zinc Stain can be used to stain a gel in just 15 minutes. The sensitivity is similar to silver staining – but without the tedious staining process. Best of all, the E-Zinc Stain doesn’t require the proteins to be fixed in the gel, so the proteins are not altered. That means you can stain a gel before transferring for Western blot or analyzing by mass spectrometry.

Figure 1. E-Zinc Reversible Stain.
Gels viewed and photographed with white light against blue background.

Highlights:

Sensitive – see as little as 0.25 ng of protein
• Fast – results in 15 minutes
• All components are ready to use
• No fixing of gel required
• Develops opaque white background while protein bands remain clear

Useful staining strategy for:

• Protein recovery for antibody generation or immunological detection
• Protein/peptide recovery from gel for sequencing purposes
• Protein digest sequencing by mass spectrometry
• Biological enzyme activity assays
• Western blots (pre- or post-transfer)
• Quick purity checks before proceeding with purification or transfer for Western blotting

Reversibility of stain allows:

• Alternative staining of same gel
• Protein elution or transfer after gel staining and destaining

Figure 2. E-Zinc staining protocol.

Figure 3. E-Zinc destaining protocol.

References:

1. Amano, S., et al. (2000). J. Biol. Chem. 275, 22728-22735.
2. Steiglitz, B.M., et al. (2002). J. Biol. Chem. 277, 49820-49830.