In DNA fingerprinting, DNA fragments cut by endonucleases are placed in small depressions (our teacher calls them wells) in an AGAROSE GEL. I heard that agarose is made of seaweed. Why is agarose used instead of other materials? Does it have any special properties? I can't really find them in books. Hope you have the answer.

As i know agar is polysacharid which is used as setting agent in culture mediums in microbiology. Microorganisms dont decompose them - that should be one characteristic you need. To set medium need concentration about one to 3%.

Hope this little help.

Just a small point but agarose isn't made of seaweed, it's produced from seaweed (i.e. only part of it).

 

Anyway, basically it just forms a gel which has lots of holes allowing the cut DNA to migrate through the gel.

 

check out the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agarose

thx

Just so you can tell your teacher, DNA-fingerprinting with agorose gels is old fashion, no respected forensic lab performs such experiments anymore.

 

The current state of the art applies capillary electrophoreric separation of fluoresced labelled short tandem repeats.