We used the 48 well combs and did have some excellent results with each
of the brands. Neither appeared to have any well-to-well cross-talk
problems. Both had occasional distorted lanes due to little acrylamide
strings.
Genetic BioSystems--The new adhesive has evidently solved the blue haze
problem. We thought that the fact that you can only load about .5ul on
the teeth was a problem because denaturing .5ul without drying the
sample is rather tricky and the size standard is too expensive to
waste. Drying the well and filling with the sample loading goop is an
inconvenient additional step. When we tested short segments of the
comb, they went in fine, but when we tried the 48-well combs it was
nearly impossible to get all the teeth in without bending any. We did
not try to load the combs and apply them to the gels several hours
later, but people say it works!
The Gel Company--We were able to load 2ul with no problem. My
technicians were able to consistently get the comb into the gel without
bending any teeth both dry and with buffer. (I personally had better
luck applying it with buffer.) This comb produced very nice, straight
lanes. Since we can apply the comb wet, I'm going to double load some
gels to see if the second loading looks as good as the first. One major
problem is that it looked to us as if we might be losing some
small-sized product--the size standard definitely had lighter bands
especially below the 250 band.
Thanks in advance for any feedback or advice.
Linda
--Linda Wood Ballard Genomics Core Facility Huntsman Cancer Institute 7370 Eccles Institute of Human Genetics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112-5330
(801) 581-3875 FAX (801) 585-3833