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The reason for degassing your gels is to remove oxygen. Oxygen in the gel interferes with polymerisation, slowing it down and making it less consistent, so degassing makes it faster and more uniform. From the EncorBio SDS-PAGE protocol: Polymerization is quicker and more uniform if you degas the first three solutions for a few minutes in an Ehrlenmeyer ...

A list of dyes is available here and a list of dyes specific to nucleic acids is available here. I think you have two choices the SYBR Gold nucleic acid gel stain (S11494) which can be detected under UV light (not sure if it can be used with polyacrylamide gels). Your other option which can be used with polyacrylamide gels is the SYBR Green II RNA gel stain ...

I don't have hands on it, but I will not be surprised if supercoiled DNA migrates at different distances according to some inner topological conformation (i.e., more or less coiled AND/OR more or less nicked). Similarly, this picture highlights >8 conformations. What is run in the gel is circularized phage DNA with some degree of knotting due to the ...

I would think GelRed or GelGreen would be an option too. They claim to be more sensitive than EtBr and certainly less toxic (even moreso than SYBR Green). I haven't personally used them against such a small bp product though. GelRed has basically the same excitation/emission wavelengths as EtBr so no equipment change is needed. Product sheet Store link

The major effect of changing the redox environment of a protein is the formation or breakage of disulfide bonds. Under sufficiently reducing conditions no disulfide bridges will be present, while under oxidizing conditions your protein will form disulfide bridges if it has the ability to do so. Disulfide bridges can significantly change the tertiary ...

Unlike in an SDS-PAGE, where the SDS adds negative charges to all proteins, in a standard agarose gel for nucleic acids all proteins should move according to their own charge. You can get a rough idea in which direction Taq would move by getting the amino acid sequence and calculating the isoelectric point at the pH you are running your get at. It might be ...

Yes, it is the genomic DNA that is causing you trouble. Although a brief 1000g spin should bring it all down, the pellet is never tight and you almost always are going to pull up some gunk with the clear supernatant. A better solution is to include a quick sonication step (5-10s) before the 1000g spin. That way, the DNA is sheared and it should pellet ...

Since there's a lot of methanol in Coomassie stain, a significant amount would probably evaporate off each time you microwave it. Therefore, it'd be probably a good idea not to reuse it because (1) you're losing methanol, and (2) the concentration of everything else is thrown off. Why do you boil the stain? I just pour mine at RT right on the gel and it ...

I have been running gels with different Acrylamide/Bisacrylamide ratios recently. People usually work with 1:37.5, 1:29 ratios which are commonly used for DNA and Protein gels. I have noticed that when you work with lower ratios 1:200 - 1:500, degassing becomes fundamental to guarantee reproducible resolution of my proteins. If I don't degass the mix in one ...

Doing westerns with primary tissue can be tough, especially because of the presence (sometimes at high levels) of extracellular matrix (ECM). This material can be quite resistant to homogenization and some lysis buffers. One method I have found to work is to snap-freeze the tissue in liquid nitrogen (not on dry ice or at -80°C) directly after removal ...

This is the figure the question is about. On the right is the control experiment with GTP-γS, on the left without it: The bands that are visible in both experiments are unspecific binding. If GTP-γS doesn't affect their presence, the mechanism by which they bind to the column can't be specific to the GTPase functionality. The proteins the authors were ...

I'll answer only for SDS-Page, which is the system I am most familiar with. With a discontinuous buffer system, such as the well-known Laemmli system, resistance increases during electrophoresis, as (very mobile) chloride ions are replaced by glycinate (glycine ions). From Ohms law: Voltage (V) = Current (I) x Resistance (R) and the definition of ...

If the salt content or pH is different than "normal," run time can be affected. After all, you're applying an electric current to the sample(s) and ion concentrations and pH are sensitive to that current. Of these two, salt/ion levels are more likely to have an effect as your samples/markers are likely to be adequately buffered.

Gianpaolo is correct that you are seeing the different conformations of circular DNA. Growing plasmids up in bacteria produces 3 main forms: relaxed, coiled and super-coiled. Relaxed tends to run a little higher than the expected size because it cannot travel as efficiently through the agarase; Coiled migrates a little farther than the expected size ...

Well, to rationalize everyone's comments, I think @leonardo is right. This is a denaturing SDA PAGE gel. The migration of the SDS Micelles which are negatively charged, depends upon the shielding of the solution around it. The difference in mobility is because the SDS micelles will experience a slightly different field at pH ~6.2 (MES) vs 7.2 (MOPS). ...

SDS PAGE system rely on the fact that protein is denatured and surrounded by the SDS negatively charged detergent micelle. This eliminates most of the charge and idiosyncratic solubility differences from one protein to another and gives a reasonable separation based only on size of the protein which is related to the size of the SDS micelle around each ...

The thermal cycler adjusts sample temperature based on the volume of the sample. So if you run samples of different volumes side by side, not all of them will cycle through the optimal temperatures of each step. If you were working with a "hot start" polymerase this is even more critical, as the Taq won't be able to amplify at all unless the sample is heated ...

The answer to the part of your question concerned with average lengths of restriction fragments is: if the DNA molecule being digested is of random sequence, and is 50% GC/ 50% AT, then the probability of finding any given short sequence at any position is 1/4N where N is the length of the short sequence. So, for example for a restriction enzyme with a ...

If you use pre-staining, the stain migrates as well in the electric field and this can lead to some parts of the gel being unstained. This would look pretty much like you describe, the ladder being invisible as well points strongly to that part of the gel just being no stained properly. It sounds a bit unlikely with your running parameters, I've only seen ...

This is really sounds like a guideline, a starting place, not necessarily your best protocol. In practice its hard to be more specific as MS says. The pH of the buffer will affect the charge of the protein, and to a lesser extent the DNA. Also the protein may have an ideal pH for binding which you could guess is in the range of 7.0-7.4, but might find ...

Try this one Pavel, A. B. & Vasile, C. I. PyElph - a software tool for gel images analysis and phylogenetics. BMC Bioinformatics 13, 9+ (2012). You can download here http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyelph/