How Was Gel Electrophoresis Developed?
Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius, The Founder of Gel Electrophoresis
10 August 1902 – 29 October 1971
The development of gel electrophoresis began with the pioneering work of Arne Tiselius, a Swedish biochemist who had published his first paper on electrophoresis in the paper "A New Apparatus for Electrophoretic Analysis of Colloidal Mixtures" in 1937 and awarded the Noble prize on his work in 1948. This work was known as Tiselius’ landmark moving boundary electrophoresis (MBE) which used a U-shaped tank with an electrode at either end and had effectively separate the molecules in free solution. Arne Tiselius' moving boundary electrophoresis method was in general use after its invention and soon replaced by zone electrophoresis (ZE) in the 1950s, which separate the molecules in a variety of solid supporting media such as filter paper, cellulose and starch grains.
The term “electrophoresis” was generated from the Greek word “phoresis”, which carry the meaning of ‘being carried’, and primarily referred to the migration of charged particles in an electrical field. Since the 1980s, these related techniques have evolved rapidly to become indispensable bioanalytical tools, and became the fundamental for a variety of biochemical methods, includes DNA fingerprinting, Western blot, Southern blot and others today.
Besides, it is an important preparative technique to fractionally purify the desired biomolecules (DNA) before further characterization and identification by other advanced molecular technique and technology such as DNA sequencing or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) .