Rapid lipid-staining procedure for paper electrophoretograms.

Paper electrophoresisiswidely used in clinicalmedicine as a screening test for hyperlipidemia. It is a simple, reproducible procedure, but requires 36 h to complete. Aliquota of sera are electrophoresed 16-18 h, paper strips are dried for 30 mm, followedby overnightstaining(1, 2). Recently it was reported that stainingtime could be decreased to 2 h by using Oil Red 0 stain in acetone-water solvent (3). By this technique of staining we found that the alpha/beta lipoprotein (a/fl) ratio was not consistent with that obtained by either the conventional staining technique (1, 2) or ultracentrifugal method (4). The alpha-lipoprotein band, in particular, stained less intensely than by the other techniques (1, 2). The cause of this could be (a) staining time is not optimal for this less stainable fraction (5), or (b) the lipoprotein or lipid of the lipoprotein is eluted by the dye-solvent mixture. Prolonging the staining time of the method (3) to 4, 8, or even 16 h did not result in appreciably more intense staining in the alpha region,so it seemed that factor b above probably accounted for the lack of dye uptake by alpha-lipoprotein. The high organic solvent concentration (68.6 volumes of acetone to 31.4 volumes of water) of the method (3) tends to support this idea. The staining procedure we describe here results in optimum staining in 2.5 h of lipoproteins on paper-electrophoretic strips.