How to identify lanes on large agarose gels?

[Michael Sullivan]

Why not include something bigger in size than you expect for your PCR  
products in every lane, e.g. linerarized plasmid.

Mike

On Aug 6, 2007, at 1:09 PM, Peter Frank wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I ran a large agarose gels for analyzing PCR products. The gel has
> many narrow lanes. Problem is that there isn't a band in every lane,
> sometimes there are several empty lanes between bands, and this makes
> it difficult to identify the lanes because the wells are not visible
> on the gel picture. However, I need to be able to clearly identify the
> lanes so that I know where there is a PCR product and where there is
> none.
>
> Drawing equally sized lines to locate the lanes did not really work
> well because of the imperfection of the gel or gel run.
>
> Can you give me any tips on how to handle this problem? I was thinking
> of putting a marker lane onto the gel every 4 lanes so that there
> wouldn't be large spaces without anything. But I am not sure if this
> is the best solution (besides, it would cost me a lot of DNA marker).
>
> Peter
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---
Michael L. Sullivan
Plant Research Molecular Geneticist
US Dairy Forage Research Center
ARS-USDA
1925 Linden Drive West
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-0046 (Phone)
(608) 890-0076 (FAX)