Silver staining Coomassie stained gels

From: K Singh

Dear All,
Can anyone suggest me a protocol for silver-staining the PAGE that is
already stained with Coomassie.
Kris

----------
From: Ed Pozharski

Just destain it and then use the standard silver-staining protocol.  If
for some reason you want to have both stainings superimposed, take two
pictures and then combine them - it should be easy to do by
superimposing the ladders, just make sure that pictures are of the same
size (maybe tricky if you don't have an imager, but nothing GIMP
couldn't overcome).

--
"Hurry up before we all come back to our senses!"
                          Julian, King of Lemurs

----------
From: Artem Evdokimov

Destain it really well. One easy peasy option is to put the gel in water and add 1 or 2 ml of cheap Q sepharose to it then boil. Gel will destain in 2-3 minutes of boiling.

----------
From: Soisson, Stephen M

Now that's a nifty trick I hadn't heard of before!

----------
From: Artem Evdokimov

It is nice indeed, that's how we stainand destain our gels in less than 8 minutes :-) there was at one time a proprietary product like tis called magic beads or somesuch. But regular resin works ;-)

----------
From: Dima Klenchin


There is absolutely nothing wrong with silver staining of a Coomassie-stained gel without destaining. It only prevents "blowout" of most intense bands already well-visible with Coomassie. The only thing to do is to equlibrate the gel in water before going with silver. At least that's my experinece with the silver staining protocol that is based on tungstosilicic acid (aka Bio-Rad Silver Stain Plus described here for DNA in agarose but works equally well for proteins in PAAG: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2446526 ).

- Dima