A clear picture – staining tips for gel electrophoresis

02/26/25 • 10 min

You can run the perfect agarose gel to separate your nucleic acid fragments but if you don’t stain and image the gel properly, it’s all for not.

In this second installment of Mol Bio Minutes we take a look at the staining considerations for nucleic acid gel electrophoresis with Paulius Palaima, Product Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He covers the range of stains and staining approaches available while calling out pros, cons and considerations for each. How these recommendations change, depending on your sample, is also covered in this approachable but informative episode.

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For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

You can run the perfect agarose gel to separate your nucleic acid fragments but if you don’t stain and image the gel properly, it’s all for not.

Helpful resource links mentioned in this episode:

Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.

For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

Previous Episode

With knowledge comes great responsibility

Topics and terms such as biosafety, biosecurity, containment, and contamination are things most of us have heard of and think about at some level, but with the pace of molecular biology moving faster than ever, these are topics with implications that are reaching farther than ever. We’re joined by Dr. Ryan Burnette and Dr. Lauren Richardson from Merrick and company for this episode, and they’re ace communicators that help walk us through the expanding horizon and implications of these topics.

This conversation starts on the basic topics, like what biocontainment is and what’s needed for each of the four levels of biosafety labs, but it quickly moves beyond, shining a light on the security and containment needs for more than just the organisms. We hear about how the data and methods used to do modern molecular biology, as well as the data generated in the experiments, are equally precious and in need of protection and containment. With public health and safety on the line, and an acknowledgement that the pace of science moves faster than that of policy, we get into the idea of who really owns responsibility for protecting data. Your role might be more important than you know, so don’t miss this conversation that will make you pause and think!

Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.

For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

Next Episode

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Ramesh makes this complex and interdisciplinary science approachable and gives hope to how it could help address problems of “forever chemicals” and other environmental and manufacturing challenges. Join us for this interesting and inspiring conversation.

Subscribe to get future episodes as they drop and if you like what you’re hearing we hope you’ll share a review or recommend the series to a colleague.

For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.