Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 20, 2026

Separation of Single-stranded DNA, Double-stranded DNA and RNA from an Environmental Viral Community Using Hydroxyapatite Chromatography
Published on: September 29, 2011
DNA capillary electrophoresis using poly(vinyl alcohol). II. Separation media
Tohei Moritani1, Kyunghwan Yoon, Benjamin Chu
1Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3400, USA.
Abstract:
We represent the first extensive study on DNA capillary electrophoresis using various poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVAL)-related polymers as separation media. As a separation medium, PVAL homopolymer has shown poor resolutions probably due to its very strong hydrogen-bonding characteristics, resulting in extensive self-aggregation. On the other hand, poly(vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) and poly(vinyl alcohol-co-1-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone) (PVAL-VP), both with a degree of polymerization of approximately 3.0x10(3), have been found to give excellent electropherograms with good resolutions for the analysis of double-stranded (ds)DNA. PVAL-VP, with hydrolytic stability in high and low pH regions, has also yielded fair electropherograms for single-stranded (ss)DNA under neutral and alkaline conditions, although further investigation is essential in order to increase the resolutions necessary for DNA sequencing analysis. The separations obtained under alkaline conditions have shown significantly shorter retention times, one-third of that for the current commercial separation media, due to the higher ionization of phosphate groups in the DNA chains.
Related Concept Videos
Capillary Electrophoresis: Applications
Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) separates ionic components based on their electrophoretic mobility. It has been used to separate proteins, amino acids,...
Capillary Electrophoresis: Instrumentation
Electrophoresis: Overview
There...
SDS-PAGE
A variation of gel electrophoresis, termed polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), is commonly used for separating proteins according to their molecular size by passing them through a polyacrylamide gel. Because of the varying charges associated with amino acid side chains, PAGE can be used to separate intact proteins...
Two-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis
The first dimension separation uses the isoelectric focusing or IEF technique performed on immobilized pH gradient (IPG) strips that separate proteins according to their isoelectric points.
Biological samples, such as cells...
DNA Agarose Gel Electrophoresis
Gel extraction follows five major steps: running gel electrophoresis to separate fragments, isolating the individual bands, extracting DNA from those bands, and removing the dye and salts from the extracted mixture to obtain pure DNA.
In cloning experiments, both the insert and vector DNA...

