Agarose gel electrophoresis - for separating bacteria cells?! (May/16/2006 )

Hello everyone!
As we known, cells can be saparated and detected by capillary electrophoresis (CE).
Have you ever heard / read / experienced that agarose gel electrophoresis can be applied to separate bacteria cells? I have searched about this idea but no information seen yet.
Thank you!


Phuc

thinkin about the principes of agorse gel electrophoresis there are some problems i would expect with this approach

agarose matrix to small to let cells pass
cells are not intrisically negatively or positively charged and vary greatly, thus there will not be any uniformity

although i have never read anything about such a process I think i would not be feasable

But why do want to do that?How do you collect the sorted cells? It may be not efficient, and harmful for some cells.

I was thinking a few months ago about applying something along these lines to separating cells with different charges due to the presence or absence of charged outer surface molecules.

I think agarose would not work due to the size of the matrix (as grapes of wrath points out), but I think something like this might be possible in a liquid (sort of like electrolysis, with negatively charged and positively charged cells migrating to different poles) or with magnetism.

Haven't found time to give it a whirl, though...

homebrew i was reading recently that their are currently products on the market that use magnets to seperate cell lines, through antibody binding and running them through a magnetic column, apparently it works quite well not sure on what the label is on the antibody but might be worth a look, think they are produced by r&dsystems or BD