ABSTRACT
Conventional size exclusion chromatography (SEC) has been employed for a long time for the separation and purification of nucleic acids, but it has not been very successful. High-performance SEC, however, was applied to the separation of nucleic acids in 1979 (1), and the performance in SEC of nucleic acids was greatly improved. As a result, SEC became one of the effective methods to separate various types of nucleic acids according to molecular size. Since then, successful separations of RNAs (1-9), DNA fragments (818), plasmids (18-24), and oligonucleotides (25) have been reported. In this chapter, separations of these types of nucleic acids by high-performance SEC and guidelines to optimize chromatographic conditions are described.
