Practice question

Agarose forms a porous matrix with large, tunable pore sizes determined by concentration, typically 0.7 to 2 percent. This range allows efficient sieving of DNA fragments from approximately 50 bp to over 50,000 bp, covering routine plasmids, restriction digests, and genomic DNA preparations. Polyacrylamide offers much smaller pores, ideal for 5 to 500 bp resolution at single-basepair discrimination. Cellulose acetate and thin-layer matrices lack molecular sieving for nucleic acids. Agarose provides low electroendosmosis, low UV absorption, and non-denaturing separation, making it the standard choice for broad-range DNA electrophoresis.