Thermo Scientific™ Pierce™ Silver Stain for Mass Spectrometry

This silver staining kit for mass spectrometry (MS) bundles components of the high-performance Pierce Silver Stain Kit with optimized reagents to destain spots for subsequent in-gel tryptic digestion to recover peptide fragments for proteomics analysis. The resulting MS-compatible product and protocol deliver outstanding sensitivity and maintains favorable conditions for the high-yield recovery and identification (sequence coverage) of proteins by mass spectrometry. Silver staining of 2D gels is now an important intermediate step in a set of procedures that leads ultimately to identification of specific proteins in the proteome by mass fingerprinting methods. The Pierce Silver Stain protocol provides peak staining performance, flexibility, reliability and robustness for applications such as MALDI-MS.

Highlights:

• Sensitive and fast staining – the low-background, easy-to-use silver stain provides subnanogram sensitivity, detecting proteins at less than 0.25ng per spot in 30 minutes after fixing

• Flexible staining protocol – fix gel for 15 to 30 minutes or overnight without any effect on staining performance; stain for 1 to 30 minutes (typically 2 to 3 minutes)

• Robust – effective silver stain for even difficult-to-stain basic proteins, such as lysozyme (pI 10) and chymotrypsinogen A (pI 9.2), which are detectable at 0.2ng and 0.5ng, respectively

• Simple, trouble-free spot preparation – stained spots in excised gel-pieces are easily destained and made ready for tryptic digestion in one hour

• MS compatible – reagents and protocol are optimized to provide excellent performance in mass spectrometry following extraction of peptides from stained 1D or 2D gels (SDS-PAGE)

• Complete kit – contains all reagents necessary for staining and destaining before in-gel proteolysis and peptide recovery for analysis by mass spectrometry

• Convenient – kit-components are stable at room temperature; saves valuable refrigerator space and eliminates the need to equilibrate reagents before use

Includes:

Sensitizer, stain, developer and enhancer solutions for silver staining gels; Reagent solutions A and B for destaining excised gel pieces