Courtesy of Pierce Biotechnology
It is a lament heard in labs everywhere, usually on Friday nights: "I can't go out, I've got to run a gel." Whether you are a postdoc, technician, or full-fledged professor, chances are good you've said this at one time or another.
Precast gels won't make that sense of responsibility go away, of course. But they do make the electrophoretic process a bit simpler, their manufacturers say, and much more reproducible.
Available in a dizzying array of formats and sizes, precast gels come in two basic forms, polyacrylamide and agarose, and serve two basic applications: protein separation and DNA separation. Polyacrylamide gels typically are used for protein separation, though they can be used for DNA work with the right buffer, whereas agarose gels are used for nucleic acid studies. Both types generally are available in a range of gel percentages (which affects the gel's resolving power), ...
