As ethidium bromide is carcinogenic, there are several biological and environmental problems are associated with it. Is there any alternative chemical for Ethidium bromide for the detection of DNA in Agarose gel which is non carcinogenic and safe for environment?
Thanks.
Hi. This may interest you, a colleague of mine, T. Govindaraju, has developed non-toxic, non-mutagenic probes which are at least as good as EtBr in sensitivity. They are water soluble, use visible excitation (530 nm excitation, 650 nm emission) and no UV damage to sample. You can contact him if you have any questions or need samples. Good luck. meher
Besides EtBr we are also using GelRed, which is claimed to be non-toxic. As long as I know there is also GelGreen. However, we also take precautions not to get in contact with GelRed, just to be on the save side ;-)
Methylene Blue, Crystal Violet, and SYBR safe are three other stains besides Ethidium Bromide and Gel Red.
Supposed to be more sensitive than SYBR dyes: Diamond™ Nucleic Acid Dye by Promega.
Cheers, Christian
Hi, there are few safer option available now a days, with safety precautions, we been using SYBR safe and GelRed quite extensively for both RNA and DNA. Good luck!
BTW, Ethidium bromide is found to be toxic against yeast, single cells, and unprotected embryos. There is no direct evidence of its mutagenicity or genotoxicity against animals or humans, not in my knowledge at least. There is nothing wrong in using more sensitive nucleic acid stains but not because Ethidium bromide is unsafe to handle.
agreeing with above message, this article might provide some answers, http://bitesizebio.com/95/ethidium-bromide-a-reality-check/
We use GelRed stain and it works perfectly in our lab. It is supposed to be non-toxic...However, as a DNA intercalating agent, we use gloves and avoid direct contact with this compound.
You can use SYBR Safe Stain. And it is not that sensitive so it could help you to avoid the overexposure problem.
Hello Kunal,
you can definitely use SYBR Safe DNA Gel stain (Life technologies ref# S33102). This compound is way less toxic than Ethidium Bromide and may be visualized under blue light which reduce even more the potential toxicity of this product. We use it in our lab for years now and it works as well as Ethidium Bromide.
Good luck with your experiments!
Hi. This may interest you, a colleague of mine, T. Govindaraju, has developed non-toxic, non-mutagenic probes which are at least as good as EtBr in sensitivity. They are water soluble, use visible excitation (530 nm excitation, 650 nm emission) and no UV damage to sample. You can contact him if you have any questions or need samples. Good luck. meher
Hi. This is a graphic summarizing what I mentioned about the dye earlier. Please see if it interests you. Best wishes.
there are controversial speech about the effect of ethidium bromide but the syber green more sensitive ,safe but more expensive with my best regards
try gel red nucleic acid stain, it is safe and we have better experience with it than with sybr green
you could use either GelRed or SYBR Safe (GelGreen). Another thing I could suggest is to double check the filters in your gel doc/image captruing system if they comaptible to capture SYBR Safe/GelRed images(most of the recent ones does, but some of the old systems doesn't capture the image well with non-ethbrom strained gels). All the best
Methyl green is also an alternative I think it should be considered. It is much safer under the Ames’ test Article Mutagenicity testing of some commonly used dyes. Appl Enviro...
and its price is very low. Furthermore, you do not have to expose your DNA (or yourself) to UV illumination. Worth a try.Article A fast, low cost, and highly efficient fluorescent DNA label...
Best, Daniel
Hi Kunal,
Ethidium bromide is not very environmentally friendly and some alternatives include SYBR safe, SYBR green, and SYBR gold. Check out this video that includes a chart comparing these 3 alternatives to ethidium bromide!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD91fvWQ7y0
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