Pierce silver stain rescue reagent enables removal of undesirable background from unevenly and overly developed silver-stained polyacrylamide electrophoresis gels.

• Mix the reagents at the recommended dilution and it is ready to rescue silver-stained gels that have dark backgrounds as a result of over-development
• Eliminates background signal in minutes, allowing speedy but controlled reversal of the staining process to meet your objective; complete the entire process in approximate one hour
• Simpler, many times faster, and significantly less costly than repeating gel-electrophoresis and staining
• Uniformly removes silver from the entire polyacrylamide gel, enabling improvement of band visibility without altering or manipulating the data
• Removes high background or non-uniform staining, regardless of the silver stain formulation, whether commercial or homemade

This simple, two-reagent kit recovers and corrects overdeveloped silver-stained gels by uniformly removing developed silver. By slowly reversing the development process over several minutes, the Pierce Silver Stain Rescue Reagent allows one to monitor and stop destaining when the level is best for the bands of interest. In most silver staining procedures for protein gels, addition of stop-solution must be carefully timed to achieve optimal staining results; frequently, otherwise useful SDS-PAGE data are obscured by over-development at this critical step. The Silver Stain Rescue Reagent can recover over-stained gels, eliminating the need to repeat the experiment (run and stain a new gel). Most excessively stained mini gels can be corrected in less than one hour, depending on the working concentration selected.

Anomalies in the gel matrix, prolonged development or overloaded protein often cause high background and uneven staining in silver-stained gels. Such staining problems often impede detection of important results and prevent use of the gel image for publications. The rescue reagent working solution is easily prepared, and the procedure is performed at room temperature in an ordinary lighted laboratory. The formulation removes the silver stain from gels slowly so that the destaining process can be easily monitored and stopped when the desired level of background has been removed. Additionally, a slight modification of the default working solution formulation enables flexibility in destaining time and image quality.