Increased interest in practical, routine evaluation of soil health has created a need for rapid and inexpensive indicators that reflect soil nitrogen (N) status. We have been working on a soil protein measurement as an indicator of a functionally relevant and sensitive pool of organic N that can be rapidly quantified. The procedure is based on a method that was historically used to measure “glomalin,” a pool putatively of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal origin. We have validated that the procedure extracts proteins from a wide range of sources and propose that the pool of proteins extracted by this method can be viewed more broadly as a soil health indicator that reflects the primary pool of organically bound N in soil and thus as potentially available organic N. Included with our publication is our laboratory protocol. To access the full article, click here.