If I increase the temperature of agarose gel by 2-5 centigrade higher than room temperature and then let it cool down to room temperature, does it affect the structure of agarose gel? if yes what is the effect?
While the gel is warmer the structure is weakening and the effective pore size is increasing until at gelling temperature it melts but such a small difference as you describe will make no noticeable difference and the effect is reversable so I would not expect any difference once the gel has cooled again. If the temperature increase were much larger and the time long then some water would be lost to evaporation so the upper surface of the gel would be a higher gel concentration so would run differently from the bottom of the gel but I do not expect this to happen at an increase of only 2.5c at any reasonable room temperature even with low gelling agarose
Two different separation modes were used in high-performance capillary gel electrophoresis to study the effect of temperature on the separation of DNA restriction fragments, isoelectrostatic (use of constant applied electric field) and isorheic (use of constant current). In both instances, the migration properties and resolution of the DNA molecules were studied as a function of column temperature between 20 and 50°C. In the isoelectrostatic separation mode, the migration time and resolution decrease as temperature increases. In the isorheic separation mode, increasing the column temperature results in a maximum migration time for all of the DNA fragments and shows a maximum resolution for the lower molecular weight fragments (
Hello, Mahshid!
I believe that if the temperature rise were higher than the temperature you described, there could be some damage. However, since the temperature you mention is a maximum of 5 degrees, I believe there is no problem.
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