It is not recommended to use agar instead of agarose for electrophoresis. The purity is not sufficient so you get an extremely poor separation efficiency (please see attached image).

It is not recommended to use agar instead of agarose for electrophoresis. The purity is not sufficient so you get an extremely poor separation efficiency (please see attached image).

Hi Jenna ,

Usually its Not Suggested to Run The Gel Electrophoresis with agar because first the purity matters  secondaly polorisation will change , thirdly if your Nucleic acid is of low molecular weight , visiulation will be very faint or nil , separation between the bands will not be prromionent .

Regards

Aamir Javed 

Not recommended. Here your motive is not just solidification, you want to differentiate and visualize the nucleic acid on the basis of its charge. If you need clear bands of your nucleic acid you should use agarose.

Agar has different composition and intramolecular spaces are more in size, it becomes non-gel, noon transparent and fragile media which is unsuitable for electrophoresis.  Agarose is a fine granular bead which is polymerize when mixed with water and form fine intramolecular spaces.  I agree that purity is not sufficient so you get an extremely poor separation efficiency.

Just in case you are asking if you can do something cheaper than agarose as a demonstration for school children, in that case you can use almost anything, including lemon Jell-O, for a demonstration of gel electrophoresis. But NOT for research.

I did it once. The left side is agarose and the right side is agar-agar (both 1%).

The result is obvious.