Agarose Ges Lab Report

Brianna Noriega

In order to analyze a dna molecule in a molecular biology lab you must determine the length in nucleotide pairs. Electrophoresis is an extremely useful tool in order to compare the mobility on agarose gels with dna markers of known lengths. Dna is a polymer that is negatively charged due to the sugar phosphates. When dna is on an electric field such as the electrophoresis gel the different lengths of dna migrate at different rates when they move through the porous gel. The ends of the gel are marked with a negative and a positive charge this forces the negative charged dna to move through the gel which can separate the dna by their lengths. In being able to do this recombinant gene expression and dna sequencing are possible to do. In order to calibrate the agarose gel certain dyes are used
Background
The length in nucleotide pairs must be determined in order to analyze a dna molecule. Each nucleotide consist of a base: there are four different ones Thymine, adenine, guanosine, and cytosine and a phosphate group bound to a sugar. When those four bases come together they make up a sentence the different arrangement in which the bases are in can encode different genes. The smaller a DNA fragment, the more rapidly it moves during electrophoresis. There is a linear relationship between the sizes of dan fragments and their respective electrophoretic mobilities. A genome is the genetic material of an organism, this is important because the size of base pairs varies according to the genome. The genome conducts two processes such as coding for proteins that dictate phenotype and provides genetic continuity from one generation