The other thing you can try to do is "the-cheap-men-silver-stain"

scan your gel and bump up the contrast, you'd be surprised what you can detect even from a regular stained gel.
Best results are if you make the gel first as a greyscale image.

Google for Neuhoff stain and bump up the phosphoric acid to 10%.

Jürgen

-
Jürgen Bosch
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
615 North Wolfe Street, W8708
Baltimore, MD 21205
Phone: +1-410-614-4742
Lab:      +1-410-614-4894
Fax:      +1-410-955-3655
http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/

On Nov 2, 2010, at 10:19 AM, Jim Pflugrath wrote:

It reads like you need to run a lane or two with a positive control of some kind.  Can you grow lysozyme, glucose isomerase, hemoglobin or other crystals of a protein around the same expected molecular weight and try run on the gel lanes with about the same amount of crystalline volume as your putative protein crystals?


From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of xaravich ivan
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 9:51 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [ccp4bb] Crystal gel band

Hi everyone,
I have grown some crystals after micro-seeding starting from thin-small needles from needle-clusters. These crystals are larger in size than the needles but are comparable to the shape and don't look like salt crystals. But I cannot see the bands( its a complex) in the SDS-PAGE.I do not have a home source,handy and would like to send these to the synchrotron.

Is it possible to NOT see a band of protein crystals in SDS-PAGE, if, say, the amount of protein is < 1uG?
Has anyone experienced such a thing (no band in gel, but crystal diffracts)?
It would be nice if I get observations/suggestions.

ivan