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AAT Bioquest

What are the types of gel electrophoresis?

Posted February 10, 2022


Answer

There are two main types of gel electrophoresis - Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis (PAGE) and Agarose Gel Electrophoresis (AGE).

In Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis (PAGE), polyacrylamide is used as the gel matrix to separate molecules of varying sizes. It is widely used for the separation of proteins and DNA fragments with low molecular weight. There are two types of PAGE: SDS-PAGE, which uses sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as a denaturing agent and Native PAGE, in which the proteins are not denatured but are separated under native conditions.

In Agarose gel electrophoresis (AGE), agarose is used as a matrix to separate molecules of varying sizes. Also known as submarine or horizontal electrophoresis, it is more commonly used to separate DNA from a few hundred base pairs or more. In this process, varied agarose concentrations are used for separation of different sized molecules.

Additional resources

Nondenaturing agarose gel electrophoresis of RNA

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