**5. Concluding remarks**

In this manuscript, several technical tips for low-cost agarose gel electrophoresis have been described. The key factor of the tips is agarose (or agar) selection, recycling of agarose, buffer selection, and DIY equipment. Several experiments need a step to recover and isolate fractionated DNA from the agarose gel. In such cases, a high quality of agarose can affect the experiment. Nevertheless, such a highquality agarose is not always needed for simply checking the band patterns of fractionated DNA. Agarose quality can be changed in its purpose, time, place, and occasion.

Agarose gel electrophoresis is a simple technique. Based on its principle, it can be modified and customized as how much cost you spend to the experiment. Moreover, technical tips described here do not mean downgrading of experiment quality; DNA can migrate and be fractionated as the same way as the standard protocol. The important point is that a calibration test is needed at each reagent and equipment. In my experience, gel strength varies in each product, and concentration of the agar in the gel should be adjusted at each condition.

In this manuscript, the topic has been focused into mainly DNA electrophoresis by agarose gel. RNA is far more sensitive to nuclease (ribonuclease for ribonucleotides) than DNA (deoxyribonuclease for deoxyribonucleotides). This also means that much higher quality of reagents is required for RNA electrophoresis, especially eliminating a contamination of ribonuclease. Moreover, some special technique is required in RNA electrophoresis for denaturation of tertiary structure of single strand RNA. Even though there stand such points to take account of RNA, the

*Cost-Effective Technical Tips for Agarose Gel Electrophoresis of Deoxyribonucleic Acid DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93439*

buffer tank and power supply in this manuscript will also be able to work in RNA electrophoresis, because of the same principle of the electrophoresis of nucleic acids.
