Agarose gel can actually be used like this

Agar powder and agarose are both a kind of colloid with very good solidification effect and a wide range of uses. They can generally be used to make desserts, fruit juice drinks, and sugar products. They can increase the viscosity of food and make the food taste better. They can also be used for drug hygiene and have no side effects on the body.

Agarose Uses

Agar and agarose have special gelling properties, especially remarkable stability, hysteresis and hysteresis, and are easy to absorb water, with special stabilizing effects. They have been widely used in food, medicine, chemical industry, textile, national defense and other fields. According to incomplete statistics, agar and agarose have more than 1,000 uses and are internationally known as "novel East Asian products." In the food industry, it can be used to produce: crystal soft candy, shaped soft candy, aquatic products, canned meat, fruit juice drinks, pulp drinks, rice wine drinks, dairy drinks, fine products, and dairy cakes.

Due to its good biocompatibility, it is widely used in the production of biological separation media.

Simply put, remove the agar pectin from agar, and the remaining part is agarose.

Electrophoresis technology

Features

Natural agar is a polysaccharide, mainly composed of agarose (about 80%) and agaropectin. Agarose is a neutral substance composed of galactose and its derivatives and is uncharged, while agarose is a strongly acidic polysaccharide containing sulfate and carboxyl groups. Since these groups are charged, they can produce strong electroosmosis under the action of an electric field. In addition, sulfate groups can react with certain proteins and affect the electrophoresis speed and separation effect. Therefore, agarose is currently used as an electrophoresis support for plate electrophoresis, and its advantages are as follows.

(1) Agarose gel electrophoresis is simple to operate, has a fast electrophoresis speed, and samples can be electrophoresed without prior treatment.

(2) Agarose gel has a uniform structure and a high water content (about 98%~99%), which is similar to free electrophoresis. The sample diffusion is more like free current, and the sample adsorption is extremely small. Therefore, the electrophoresis pattern is clear, with high resolution and good repeatability.

(3) Agarose is transparent and has no UV absorption. The electrophoresis process and results can be directly detected and quantitatively determined using UV light.

(4) The bands after electrophoresis are easy to stain and the samples are very easy to elute, making quantitative determination easier. The dry film can be stored for a long time.

Currently, agarose is commonly used as an electrophoresis support to separate proteins and isoenzymes. Agarose electrophoresis is combined with immunochemistry to develop into immunoelectrophoresis technology, which can identify complex systems that cannot be identified by other methods. Due to the establishment of ultra-trace technology, 0.1ug of protein can be detected.

Agarose gel electrophoresis is also commonly used to separate and identify nucleic acids, such as DNA identification and DNA restriction endonuclease map preparation. Because this method is easy to operate, requires simple equipment, requires a small amount of sample, and has high resolution, it has become one of the commonly used experimental methods in genetic engineering research.

Agarose gel

Agarose gel relies on secondary chains such as hydrogen bonds between sugar chains to maintain its network structure, and the density of the network structure depends on the concentration of agarose. Generally, its structure is stable and can be used under many conditions (such as water, salt solutions in the pH range of 4-9). Agarose gel begins to melt above 40°C and cannot be sterilized by high pressure, but can be sterilized chemically.

Agarose, abbreviated as AG, is the uncharged neutral component in agar, also translated as agarin or agarose. The chemical structure of agarose is composed of β-D-galactopyranose (1-4) linked to 3,6-anhydro α-L-galactopyranosyl units.

Agarose, which is agar with almost no sulfate and is mainly composed of polysaccharides, is dissolved in hot water and cooled to form a gel. The resulting small particles are used for gel filtration. It is suitable for gel filtration of macromolecules that cannot be fractionated by sephadex. If a gel concentration of 5% or less is used, cell particles, viruses, etc. can also be fractionated. Taking advantage of its low adsorption capacity, it is sometimes used instead of agar as a support for immunoelectrophoresis or in-gel sedimentation reactions.