Capillary Electrophoresis of Single-stranded DNA

We have studied the migration behavior of single-stranded DNA using capillary gel electrophoresis under various conditions. It was found that optimum electric fields should be less than 150 V/cm for the good tradeoff between the separation time and the resolution. It seems that the gel matrix with the combination of different polymer average molecular weights is important to extend the maximum readable DNA bases. The total gel concentration less than 3.1% in the mixed gel system showed good separation efficiency up to 600 bases. The best result was obtained with the poy(ethylene)oxide (PEO) gel concentration of 1.2% of Mr 8,000,000 and 1.8% of Mr 600,000. We observed that the capillary length between 50 cm to 100 cm (effective length) should be employed for the optimization between the total DNA migration time and the maximum readable length. A trizma base-boric acid-ethlyenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) (TBE) buffer was commonly used for DNA sequencing, but we found that 3-[tris(hydroxymethyl)methyl amino]-1-propane sulfonic acid (TAPS) buffer worked as well for the single-stranded DNA separation. Especially, TAPS buffer showed a good resolution for very short DNA bases (1 to 30 bases).