An efficient histochemical method for deoxyribonucleic acids using a silver enhancement procedure.

An efficient histochemical method has been worked out for the demonstration of deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) with light microscopy. This involves a hot hydrochloric acid-thiocarbohydrazide-silver proteinate sequence followed by a physical development procedure. When applied to tissue sections from rabbit organs such as the spleen, cerebellum and testis, the new method has given excellent discrimination of nuclear DNA in all cells examined. Thus, the method is higher in efficiency and visibility of reaction products than the traditional hot HCl-Schiff (Feulgen) method used hitherto. Its specificity is also high.