Gelite™ Safe DNA Gel Stain is a 10,000X water solution developed for staining DNA in agarose and acrylamide gels. Ethidium bromide has been widely used as a DNA gel stain for many years, but it is associated with significant safety concerns, including mutagenicity, inhalation toxicity, ingestion hazards, and aquatic toxicity. Gelite™ Safe was developed as a part of AAT Bioquest's commitment to designing environment-friendly products, enabling our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. It is a less hazardous alternative for nucleic acid gel staining while maintaining strong staining sensitivity.

Gelite™ Safe exhibits very low background fluorescence because it is essentially non-fluorescent in the absence of nucleic acids. Upon binding to nucleic acids, the dye shows strong fluorescence enhancement and high DNA binding affinity, enabling sensitive DNA visualization. This staining performance allows Gelite™ Safe to be used either before electrophoresis or after electrophoresis without a destaining step, supporting flexible gel staining workflows.

Gelite™ Safe is optimized for compatibility with common gel imaging platforms, including UV transilluminators, blue-light transilluminators, gel documentation systems, and laser scanners. It is designed as a single formulation that can be detected in either green or red fluorescence channels, depending on user preference and instrument configuration. Unlike membrane-permeant SYBR® Green, Gelite™ Safe is membrane-impermeant, supporting its use as a safer and noncytotoxic alternative for gel staining. Ames testing further showed Gelite™ Safe to be significantly less mutagenic than ethidium bromide and SYBR® Green under the tested conditions, including concentrations above typical gel staining working concentrations. SYBR® is a trademark of Thermo Fisher.