ABSTRACT
It is common for older guides on gel electrophoresis and molecular biology to reproduce plans and diagrams with which to construct do-it-yourself equipment. Nowadays, there is little to be gained from trying to do experiments with, as a colleague recently put it, ‘two old windows and a bulldog clip’. Agarose is a long-chain polysaccharide containing repeating units of d-galactose and 3,6-anhydro-l-galactose. The material is extracted from seaweed and inevitably contains a variety of polysaccharide, sulfate and protein contaminants. The level of charged matrix compounds giving rise to EEO should likewise be minimal. Electrophoresis through agarose gels is not used solely to provide analytical information. Once the band corresponding to a particular molecule has been identified, recovery of DNA and RNA from the gel is the most common preparative technique in molecular biology. There are a large number of methods available with which to recover nucleic acid from agarose gels.
