Protargol staining is one of the essential techniqu for the idetification of marine ciliates. However, not all of the protozoologists, concerning to the taxonomy of marine ciliates, is using this staining since the procedure needs a little patients to establish the adequate method in each condition.
Generally, "silver impregnation" tehniqu have been developped in various fields, including anatomy, neurosciences, and protozoology, to get the high contrast preparation of the paticular organella for the bright field microscopy. The basic idea and procudure of the protargol staining for ciliates have been written in Bodian's paper (1936) as the method for neuro-anatomy. The recent modifications are summarised in "Protocols in Protozoology" (Foissner, Lynn, Wicklow 1992).
In this web page, I am going to show my quntitaive protargol staining procedure (QPS) based on one of the most popular and well depevopped method (Montagnes & Lynn, 1987 ).