Dear Mahdi,

The answer yes. Please read the following paragraph:

Alcian blue can be used to quantitate acidic glycans both in microspectrophotometric quantitation in solution or for staining glycoproteins in polyacrylamide gels or on western blots. Biochemists had used it to assay acid polysaccharides in urine since the 1960s for diagnosis of diseases like mucopolysaccharidosis but from 1970's, partly due to lack of availability of Alcian and partly due to length and tediousness of the procedure, alternative methods had to be developed e.g. Dimethyl methylene blue (DMB) method.[1]

[1] Clinical Chemistry March 1989 vol. 35 no. 3 374–379.

Attached is a chapter that reports the method for staining glycoproteins with Alcian.

Hoping this will be helpful,

Rafik

Dear Mahdi,

Alcian blue stains acid mucopolysaccharides and glycosaminoglycans!

And the protocol depends of the nature of your sample. I have adopted this staining method to identify adsorbed polysaccharides to polymeric substrates, and the protocol followed was:

The samples were washed with distilled water, being further immersed in the staining solution for 30 minutes up to 1 hour (until a proper staining developed). The alcian blue solution was prepared by dissolving 0.1g of Alcian blue 8GX powder in 10 mL of a 3% Acetic Acid solution at a pH of 2.5. After staining, the samples were washed with distilled water.

Although, if you intend to identify such polysaccharides in tissues, for instance, you should