SDS Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis of Proteins: Determination of Protein Molecular Weights and High-Resolution Silver Staining

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) is a quick and sensitive method for analyzing the composition of mixtures of proteins. Since the early 1970s, this method has become a routine and frequently used analytical procedure in all protein chemistry laboratories, and as such, biology students should of course be familiar with this basic technique. Originally gels were formed in small glass tubes and one sample loaded on each gel, but between-run variation made it difficult to directly compare one sample with another. This problem was overcome by the introduction of the slab gel system (1 ), in which a large number of samples can be compared on a single run. It is this system that is described in this experiment.