Abstract:

Slab gel electrophoresis is the most widely used separation method for DNA fragments, proteins and carbohydrates, and miniaturization of this process is expected to provide fast, inexpensive and convenient analyses. However, two problems concerning the miniaturization of gel electrophoresis have to be solved:the separation performance and spatial resolution of the detector. We demonstrated that the separation performance was improved by using a discontinuous gel in which a concentrating gel was used to stack the sample to a sharp band, and using thermal lens microscope (TLM), which is highly sensitive and has a spatial resolution of micron level even in light scattering matrices as a gel, such sharpened separated bands were successfully detected. In this paper, we developed a miniaturized slab gel electrophoresis apparatus, demonstrated high speed separation of DNA fragments, and applied it to genetic diagnosis of coronary heart disease.