Improvement to Lammli Gel electrophoresis - The occasional gem (Feb/28/2007 )

Hi all,

I have read this interesting review article (in The Experimenter) recently, it concerns a number of thing but the one thing that caught my eye was an improvement on the Lammli system. The details of the improvement is in a paper by Taeho Ahn in Analytical Biochemistry (291, 300 -303)

According to the review article, this improvement is a slight modification that eliminates the need for a stacking gel, with no compromise to separation.
The running buffer and sample buffer are identical to the standard Lammli running and sample buffers. The difference lies in the separating gel buffer

Composition
76mM Tris-HCl
0.1M Serine
0.1M Glycine
0.1M Asparagine

Buffer's pH is 7.4. This buffer contains no SDS. (thus gel can be used in native gel electrophoresis by simply obmitting SDS from sample and running buffer)

Other benefits is the lower pH, giving better stability to the acrylamide thus longer shelf life (6mth at 4Celsius). Insensitivity to loading volume and high NaCl concentration (upto 0.5M) and up 2% triton.


Down side appear to lower tolerance to overloading.

Overall an interesting improvement

EDIT: Sorry, clearing up an ambiguity. The modification is in the gel. The other buffers are identical.

Thanks for sharing. So instead of using two different buffer for SDS, it will be better to use only 1 type of buffer which is the buffer you were talking about?

Do you have the paper? Oh.. I found it. Thanks for the information.

Anybody tested this? Do you have a side by side comparison? The original paper contains only images of the so called "single gel", not a side by side.

Here's the link to the paper on PubMed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...m=ahn%20t%20291

Looks promising indeed. Also got a favourable review in the Feb '07 issue of Lab Times (http://www.lab-times.org/)

~j