Agarose, low gelling temperature

Agarose is a component of agar that is naturally found in the cell wall of red algae. It is hydrophilic and has a high gelling property. It is most commonly employed for gel electrophoresis, to form porous gels to analyze DNA, RNA, or proteins by size. When a voltage is applied to the system the charged nucleic acids migrate through the agarose gel and are separated by size. The stability and gelling properties of agarose make it versitile and it can be used for many other applications in research such as, plaque and comet assays, and even as a scaffolding agent to name a few.

Low-gelling agarose has been used in research:

• for gel electrophoresis, low melting temperature is ideal for DNA extraction from gel -gel scaffold material for tissue engineering using BMSCs
• to embed tissues in 5% agarose for immunohistology
• for preparation of collagen-agarose co-gels to study collagen-matrix interactions in soft tissues
• single-celled gel electrophoresis (comet assay)
• for in-vivo 3-D imaging of zebrafish larvae immobilized on agarose strips

The following is a list of properties associated with our agaroses:
Sulfate content - used as an indicator of purity, since sulfate is the major ionic group present.
Gel strength - the force that must be applied to a gel to cause it to fracture.
Gel point - the temperature at which an aqueous agarose solution forms a gel as it cools. Agarose solutions exhibit hysteresis in the liquid-to-gel transition - that is, their gel point is not the same as their melting temperature.
Electroendosmosis (EEO) - a movement of liquid through the gel. Anionic groups in an agarose gel are affixed to the matrix and cannot move, but dissociable counter cations can migrate toward the cathode in the matrix, giving rise to EEO. Since electrophoretic movement of biopolymers is usually toward the anode, EEO can disrupt separations because of internal convection.

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