Gel Electrophoresis

This technique involves the separation of molecules based on their size, in addition to the electrical charge. The movement of large molecules is slow in gel electrophoresis. Serum proteins can be separated to about 15 bands, instead of 5 bands on paper electrophoresis. It can be used as a mixed population of DNA and RNA fragments by length, size and to separate proteins by charge. The gels commonly used in gel electrophoresis are agarose and polyacrylamide, sodium dodecyl sulfate. Polyacrylamide is employed for the determination of molecular weights of proteins in a popularly known electrophoresis technique konwn as SDS-PAGE.