An improved silver stain for the visualization of lipopolysaccharides on polyacrylamide gels.

A sensitive, brief, and user-friendly silver stain to meet the needs in high-efficiency detection of lipopolysaccharides (LPS) on polyacrylamide gels is described. In this study, the most commonly used formaldehyde-based LPS silver stain, which is potentially hazardous to the operator, is replaced by ascorbic acid (Vc) in alkaline sodium thiosulfate solution. It takes only about 35 min to complete all the protocol, with a detection limit of 4 ng of total LPS. The results indicate that this user-friendly method could be a good choice for LPS visualization on polyacrylamide gels.