staining artifacts in polyacrylamide gel ?? - (Jun/10/2012 )

hi

in your experiences what are the common staining artifacts observed while staining proteins (silver,commassie etc..) in polyacrylamide gel ??

I think traces of lipids can cause staining background...

nucleic acids stain with silver (we used to use trna to coprecipitate with low concentration proteins, stopped using it when we started to stain with silver and got bright orange blobs)

an artifact, presumably attributed to keratins from dust, shows up in the 50-70 kDa range.