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Updated: May 18, 2026

Detection of Glycosaminoglycans by Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis and Silver Staining
Published on: February 25, 2021
Performance of different screening methods for the determination of urinary glycosaminoclycans
Ebru Afyoncu1, Gülsen Yilmaz, Fatma M Yilmaz
1Department of Medical Biochemistry, Ministry of Health, Ankara Training and Research Hospital, Ankara, Turkey.
Background:
The study aim was to compare the performance of three different methods used for determining urinary glycosaminoglycans (GAG) levels in spot and 24-h urine samples.
Methods:
Performance characteristics were studied for cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC), and manual and automated dimethylmethylene blue (DMB) methods.
Results:
For automated DMB method, within-run precisions were 9.10% and 1.98%, and between-day precisions were 13.0% and 5.81% in low- and high-urine pools, respectively. The method was linear up to 100 mg/L of GAG concentration. The detection limit of the method was 0.71 mg/L. Mean recovery was 95.7%.
Conclusions:
The automated DMB method was found to give better performance characteristics than cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) and manual DMB methods. It is a fast, cheap, simple and reliable method and can be applied in many diseases in which GAG is used as a screening test.

