A variety of denaturants can be used with agarose. Alkaline gels are most often employed with single-stranded Preparing Alkaline Agarose Gels At high temperatures, alkaline conditions will hydrolyze the Agarose polysaccharide chains. To prepare an…

Use the tables below corresponding to the AquaPor agarose of choice to determine the percentage gel to cast. (LE = general-purpose; LM = low melting; ES = extra strength; HR = high resolution). AquaPor LE…

Agarose electrophoresis is used for a variety of purposes. Specialty grades of agarose have been developed to fulfill specific requirements. The most commonly used variant is low-melting agarose, which has been modified to lower its…

DNA and RNA strands are extremely large macromolecules. A 1 kilobase piece of single-stranded DNA or RNA has a molecular weight of 330,000 daltons, larger than the vast majority of proteins. Often in the molecular…

Single-stranded DNA can adopt multiple conformations under non-denaturing conditions. In the absence of a complementary strand, DNA will anneal short internal complementary sequences, forming a complex “knot.” A DNA molecule follows a complex path of…

Double-stranded DNA is not a completely straight rigid rod. Sequence variations can cause bends in the double helix, or even alter the basic structure of the helix. A bend or kink in the DNA restricts…

Native DNA PAGE gels can be used to detect small mutational differences between DNA molecules. In heteroduplex analysis, for double stranded DNA, the basis of separation is the conformational difference arising from the bending of…

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis yields individual bands of extremely high purity, in that only one nucleic acid sequence tends to be present in each. Electrophoresis can thus serve as a powerful purification tool for DNA or…

Protein bound to a small piece of DNA will alter the electrophoretic mobility of that DNA fragment. This allows the analysis of protein-DNA interactions, including the measurement of binding rates, affinity, and specificity. In addition,…

Gel electrophoresis of PCR products is the standard method for analyzing reaction quality and yield. PCR products can range up to 10kb in length, but the majority of amplifications are at 1kb and below, where…