Ethidium bromide

Ethidium bromide

There are many products available in the market. you can always ask for free samples from vendors to compare which one works the best for you. Although, Ethidium bromide is the cheapest and gives best results.

For "safe" gel stains, you will probably like these: https://biotium.com/technology/gelred-gelgreen-nucleic-acid-gel-stains/  

They seem to even have a distributor in South Africa.

If you have something that binds to DNA (that's what you need for staining it, I assume), you have the risk that it interferes with DNA dependent processes like replication.  And there is still to my knowledge no scientific study proving EtBr to be mutagenic. IMHO, all those "safer than EtBr" stains are a hype, solely to squeeze money out of panicking people.

Ethidium bromide. It's not nearly as toxic as it is made out to be. Not to mention the fact that SYBR safe is more permeable to living cells than EtBr, making the former more of a risk to us than the latter. Not to mention that your average 50kg researcher would probably have to ingest about 50 liters of EtBr gel staining solution to even reach the highest non toxic dose given to cows. http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2006/10/heresy-about-ethidium-bromide.html?m=1

Don't buy into the hype. 

Gel Safe: SKU/LYM1009 from Speed BioSystems.  Don't know the price, but we switched to that to avoid the expense of cleaning up EtBr.

Ethidium bromide

Ethidium Bromide is the cheapest

Depends on which costs you care about. EtBr is cheaper to buy, but may not be cheaper to use, because it is way less sensitive. This means you need to use more mass of your size standards to see them. If you are buying your size standards, it might save you money to use the more sensitive stains. I haven't run the numbers yet to see whether it is a net positive, but at the very least the savings would offset the cost of the more expensive stain, so it may not be as expensive as it initially seems. If you want to save even more time and money, stop using TBE and TAE for running buffers! You can use a simple low-salt buffers that cost less and are easier to make and allow you to run your gels faster without overheating (Brody JR, Kern SE. Ultra-fast high-resolution agarose-electrophoresis of DNA and RNA using low-molarity conductive media. BioTechniques 2004; 37:598-602).

I agree with Grieg, it really depends on what cost you care about. Although one of the reasons EtBr ended up being more expensive for us was because of the waste charges for clean up, which you don't incur with the "safe dyes". Also you should test out different concentrations of sybersafe, we found that you only actually needed about half of what they recommended for most of our applications. Different companies may also give you competitive pricing if you ask, the rep from Denville scientific gave us a good price for their greenglo dye to be competitive with Lifetech.

Try Gelred (Biotium) its non toxic and can be discarded in normal waste. Our lab always uses it and gives good result without high background. EtBr could be deadly if not managed properly. Kindly check the following link:

https://biotium.com/product/gelredtm-nucleic-acid-gel-stain-10000x-in-water/

im really confused with gelred dilution like we have 10000x of 0.5 ml gelred.. can you please tell me how should i dilute it so i can use it in staining 50ml or 100ml gel.. they said finally it should be 1x in gel and from what we have we can make 100s of 50ml gel..

thank you in advance

Ethidium bromide. If you read the ads for *.safe carefully, there is never a claim that EtBr has scientifically been proven to be harmful to humans, cows (for the latter it has been developed for and is used as an i.m. drug against Trypanosomiasis) or other mammals. It's all just advertising blurb, the same style like for all those supplements where it's not legal to endorse any health benefits (other than for the pocket of the producer). Correct me if I should be wrong.