An Undergraduates Guide

to Gel Electrophoresis
A Technical Description of the Theory and Process of Gel Electrophoresis for
Undergraduate Students

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The purpose of this document is to describe the practice of gel electrophoresis and to
outline how this technique works. This description will discuss the equipment and
reagents used in the process and how they work together to produce a successful result.
Though this document is not meant to be a step-by-step set of instructions on how to
perform gel electrophoresis, this documents goal is to instill a novice molecular biologist
with an understanding of how the process functions.

Gel electrophoresis is a powerful analytic technique that most undergraduates in the life
sciences will encounter and likely have to perform. Even if an undergraduate student
does not perform electrophoresis in a laboratory course, he or she is likely to see this
process covered in a lecture or in scientific journals when conducting literature research.
Because of the ubiquitous nature of gel electrophoresis as an analytical technique in
molecular biology, having a solid understanding of it early in a students academic career
can be immeasurably helpful throughout the rest of his or her education. This documents
goal is to provide a foundation for understanding gel electrophoresis to undergraduate
students or to aid those students having difficulty understanding this important concept.

Introduction
Electrophoresis is the movement of charged particles in an electric field, and studies of
this property date back to the early 19th century when scientists were studying the
movement of ions in aqueous solutions. These studies produced mathematical
relationships relating the rate of movement of charged particles at varying concentrations
in aqueous mediums. During the discovery of these relationships, sharp, moving
boundaries of particles were observed. From these observations, moving-boundary
electrophoresis, or the separation of particles in a free solution, was developed. This
Nobel Prize winning invention enabled many new strategies for analyzing chemical
mixtures, though the free solutions used in moving-boundary electrophoresis were not
specific enough to separate minutely different biological molecules.

During the 1950s and 1960s, new methods of electrophoresis using semi-solid mediums
for separation took hold due to their ability to more stringently separate reagents. These
semi-solid matrices separated the moving boundaries of different molecules to such an
extent that discreet bands separating the compounds of a mixture were produced. It was
not until the introduction of using starch gel as the electrophoretic matrix that

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Electrophoretic matrix- another term for the gel through which the samples move. It denotes the
environment that dictates the samples behavior.

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