An effective method for silver-staining DNA in large numbers of polyacrylamide gels.

Silver-staining of nucleic acid has been used for various biological analyses, including polymerase chain reaction-single-strand conformation polymorphism (PCR-SSCP) analysis. A variety of methods have been described, but these methods are not that effective for staining more than a few PCR-SSCP gels, especially rapidly and with high sensitivity, because they include a number of time-consuming or hazardous manual steps that are often time dependent. Here we report a silver-staining method that can efficiently stain up to 14 gels at one time and with a detection limit of approximately 10 pg of DNA/mm(2), which is comparable to other methods.