Practical tips for staining nucleic acid PAGE gels without rips! & more tips on using SYBR gold, etc

Some practical tips to stain your nucleic acid PAGE gel without rips!

stick a piece of saran wrap into your staining container & stain on top of it - this way you can lift the saran wrap to take the gel out and transfer it to and fro, reposition it, etc. all without ripping
to prevent ripping when getting your gel into the stain… go into it rather than pour onto it
crack open the cassette carefully and pull apart slowly making sure the whole gel stays on one of the plates (let it go the way it’s trying to for now)
angle the plate, gel-side down, into the stain (transfer into the stain and not stain onto gel), let the gel contact the stain and use the surface tension and some gentle nudging to ease it into the stain

other tips:
when you first open a new dye vial, aliquot out single portion aliquots (e.g. 5μL SYBR gold which will make 50mL worth of stain) into PCR tubes and freeze)
note: don’t worry about measuring out exactly 50mL, just eyeball it in a Falcon tube
make sure to cover things in foil when working with fluorescent stains so they stay fluorescent
prepare the stain in your running buffer (e.g. TBE), not water
it will be more stable in the buffer and you can even reuse it if you’re just visualizing & not trying to gel extract (in which case you want to avoid contamination so make fresh) - save covered in foil in the fridge

Hope that helps and hope your gels look good!

more on nucleic acid PAGE: http://bit.ly/ureapage &    • Nucleic acid PAGE (Polyacrylamide Gel Elec...  
more on fluorescent nucleic acid stains: http://bit.ly/fluorescentstains &    • Fluorescent nucleic acid stains & fluoresc...  
more on gel extraction: https://bit.ly/gel_extraction_crush &    • Gel extraction with the "crush and soak" m...  

more random practical lab tips: https://bit.ly/lab_tricks_page  &    • Practical lab tips & tricks  
  
more about all sorts of things: #365DaysOfScience All (with topics listed) 👉 http://bit.ly/2OllAB0 or search blog: http://thebumblingbiochemist.com       
     
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