How can you be sure that your precious crystals are protein and not salt?

With the help of JBS Crystal Dyes you can discriminate between macromolecular crystals and salt crystals within minutes. Whatever suits your taste, you can stain your crystals blue, purple, green or red. All our crystal dyes are small molecules which are able to permeate the solvent channels of proteins and thus, staining them. In contrast, salt crystals will remain colorless.

Our JBS Black Light is a nonspecific fluorescent crystal dye used for the detection of protein crystals in crystallization trials. The fluorescence signal can be exploited to contrast protein crystals above background artifacts and enables the detection of microcrystals, even if they are located under a protein skin. Thus, the dye is suitable for automatic crystal detection.