Application Of Gel Electrophoresis
Gel electrophoresis technique has been widely used in many area in biotechnology includes molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics and forensics. The result of gel electrophoresis is often incorporated with other techniques depends on the type of analysis being carried out and thus provided a large range of field-specific applications.
Application of gel electrophoresis in estimation of size of DNA molecules and investigation of DNA cleavage efficiency of small molecules, for example, are extensively used in molecular biology. Gel electrophoresis enables separation of restricted genomic DNA prior to Southern blotting, of RNA prior to Northern transfer or of protein prior to Western transfer.
Gel electrophoresis is also commonly used in plant breeding and genomics for genotyping with molecular markers. For instance, specific DNA fragments isolated and purified from desired studied plant followed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the resulting DNA fragment are loaded on a gel. The DNA can then be separated by electrophoresis to visualize bands of a molecular marker to genotype individual plants and Check the quality and quantity of genomic DNA after DNA extraction besides separate DNA fragments to clone a specific band.
Todays, gel electrophoresis has been used in analysis of PCR products especially in molecular genetic diagnosis or genetic fingerprinting with the measurement and analysis are mostly done with specialized software.
