Ethanol in PCR clean-up - Can I trust lab ethanol stocks (Mar/04/2010 )

Hello,

I am new to this forum and molecular biology generally. So I have been doing PCR, I now need to clean-up my product and am using a Min-Elute kit from Qiagen. I have to dilute the buffers included with ethanol of which we have lab stocks. My dumb question: Is it safe to use these lab stocks ? How susceptible to contamination is ethanol? I will soon be moving onto RNA work and am also wondering the same thing......can I trust lab stocks of ethanol or should I buy in my own........can I make ethanol nuclease free??

Thanks

Oh am using the PCR product for sequencing after clean-up

Assuming your lab is not populated by high school students, I would use the ethanol without worry.

just make sure the ethanol is at least 95% pure.

i have seen Industrial based ethanol (Cheap stufff) that we would use for flaming or the typical 70% etoh disinfectant being used for DNA-based work.

urg needless to say inconsistent sequencing result, bad digest etc etc.

it will smell different. pure ethanol won't sting the nose as compared to cheap one

Hello guys!

Thanks so much for your replies - it's nice just to get a bit of reassurance from somebody!

Hope your work is going OK and better than mine