LB buffer, also known as lithium borate buffer, is a buffer solution used in agarose electrophoresis, typically for the separation of nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. It is made up of Lithium borate ( lithium hydroxide monohydrate and boric acid).
LB(R) is a registered (USPTO) trademark of Faster Better Media LLC, which owns US patent 7,163,610 covering low-conductance lithium borate polynucleotide electrophoresis.
Lithium Borate buffer has a lower conductivity, produces crisper resolution, and can be run at higher speeds than can gels made from TBE or TAE (5-50 V/cm as compared to 5-10 V/cm). At a given voltage, the heat generation and thus the gel temperature is much lower than with TBE/TAE buffers, therefore the voltage can be increased to speed up electrophoresis so that a gel run takes only a fraction of the usual time. [1] Downstream applications, such as isolation of DNA from a gel slice or Southern blot analysis, work as expected with lithium boric acid gels. [2] [3]
SB buffer containing sodium borate is similar to lithium borate and has nearly all of its advantages at a somewhat lower cost, but the lithium buffer permits use of even higher voltages due to the lower conductivity of lithium ions as compared to sodium ions and has a better resolution for fragments above 4kb.
See also
External links
References
- ^ Brody, J.R., Kern, S.E. (2004): History and principles of conductive media for standard DNA electrophoresis. Anal Biochem. 333(1):1-13. doi: 10.1016/j.ab.2004.05.054 PMID 15351274 PDF
- ^ Sodium boric acid: a tris-free, cooler conductive medium for DNA electrophoresis. Biotechniques 36(2):214-215. PMID 14989083 PDF Archived 2011-07-24 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Brody, J.R., Calhoun, E.S., Gallmeier, E., Creavalle, T.D., Kern, S.E. (2004): Ultra-fast high-resolution agarose electrophoresis of DNA and RNA using low-molarity conductive media. Biotechniques 37(4):598-602. PMID 15517972 PDF[ permanent dead link]
.svg){kind=small} | This biochemistry article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |