Associated problems of protein electrophoresis, staining and densitometry.

The process of electrophoresis, a separation phenomenon, is mistakenly understood to include the sequential processes ancillary to analyte resolution, that is, staining and quantification, where the latter could be elution followed by photometry or integrating-calculating-densitometry. The theories involved in electrophoresis itself are well worked out and equally well understood but the problems which are associated with separation, chemical reaction to generate a chromogen and quantification, perhaps partly forgotten and perhaps partly ignored, are taken up and described here. They include albumin trail, resolution, unequivalent staining, prestaining and the densitometry problems associated with band widths, opacity effects and polychromaticities.