A freeze-and-thaw method to reuse agarose gels for DNA electrophoresis

Agarose gel electrophoresis is a laboratory technique commonly used to separate DNA fragments by size. However, it can also be used to isolate and purify DNA fragments using a gel extraction protocol.
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...

Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis is a high-resolution protein separation method first introduced by O' Farrell and Klose in 1975. This method involves protein separation by two dimensions, mass and charge, making it more accurate than one-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...

Boiling Point Elevation
The boiling point of a liquid is the temperature at which its vapor pressure is equal to ambient atmospheric pressure. Since the vapor pressure of a solution is lowered due to the presence of nonvolatile solutes, it stands to reason that the solution’s boiling point will subsequently be increased. Vapor pressure increases with temperature, and so a solution will require a higher temperature than will pure solvent to achieve any given vapor pressure, including one...

Heating a crystalline solid increases the average energy of its atoms, molecules, or ions, and the solid gets hotter. At some point, the added energy becomes large enough to partially overcome the forces holding the molecules or ions of the solid in their fixed positions, and the solid begins the process of transitioning to the liquid state or melting. At this point, the temperature of the solid stops rising, despite the continual input of heat, and it remains constant until all of the solid is...

Electrophoresis is a powerful analytical separation technique that relies on the differential migration of charged species when subjected to an electric field. The core strength of electrophoresis lies in its ability to separate high-molecular-weight species in complex mixtures. It has found widespread use in biochemistry, molecular biology, and analytical chemistry, allowing the separation of compounds like amino acids, nucleotides, carbohydrates, and proteins with excellent resolution.
There...

Capillary electrophoresis instrumentation typically consists of several key components. A high-voltage power supply generates the electric field necessary for the separation by connecting to an anode (the positively charged electrode) and a cathode (the negatively charged electrode) located in buffer reservoirs at each end of the capillary tube. The system includes a sample vial, a fused silica capillary tube coated with polyimide for mechanical strength through which the sample components...