Electrophoresis Gel?

[Martin Kennedy]

In article <3ijn3a$abc at ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>, Fegan1 at ix.netcom.com (Jim Fegan) writes:
> 	Our teacher is running on a short budget though, and she is 
> reluctant about the use of agarose gel because of it's cost.  Our lab 
> group was looking for a possible alternative to the agarose.  Our ideas 
> were few, and we even tried geletine, but it ended up melting under the 
> current.  
> 	Does anyone know of a gel that would provide a suitable matrix 
> for the electrophoresis?  If you could email me any suggestions you 
> might have, I would greatly appreciate it.
> 
> Thank you in advance,
> Jim

Agarose is a purified component of good old-fashioned bacteriological agar, 
and I believe agar works quite well for DNA gels (though I've never been 
driven to try it).  It would certainly be a lot cheaper than agarose.  If 
you use agarose, and run the gels clean of DNA, you can recycle them - 
either as is, or by remelting and pouring them.  I wouldn't recommend 
either method for serious experiemnts though! 

-- 
Cheers,

Martin

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