TBE vs TAE for agarose gel electrophoresis - (Aug/06/2006 )

Hi,

I would just like to know, is there any major difference between TBE buffer and TAE buffer for agarose gel electrophoresis. Plus, is there any different between 0.5x TBE and 1.0x TBE in the results?

Thank you.

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Essentially, no to both of your questions (I think that Maniatis, or Sambrook (=Maniatis edition 2) go into the difference, but it's not significant enough to lose sleep over it). 0.5x TBE is just less buffered. As long as your gel and the buffer are the same strength.

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Ok, thanks.. Just wondering..

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TAE is somewhat less fussy about extraction of the DNA from bands cut from the gel. TBE requires some additional chemistry during the extraction process. Any of the gel extraction kits will describe this in detail.

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TBE is supposed to improve the 'sharpness' or consistency of the migrating bands, but I never really saw a difference.

As phage434 mentioned, its a little more complicated to extract from - I'd stick with TAE if there is a choice.

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I believe TAE has less 'buffering capacity' than TBE. That means you can reuse TBE atleast 3 times while TAE can't be used more than once. The bands start getting smeary.

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I would say that is untrue, based on my experience. I have not used TBE in many years, but I use TAE all the time and re-use it, usually 3-4 times

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i havent had problem extracting DNA from the gel made using TBE. My lab uses it and our extraction procedue is not different to what others use for TAE.

I have reused TAE and TBE both for many times without any problem.

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If you make the agarose gel in TAE buffer and run the gel submerge in TBE buffer, the gel will not run.
I had try it and got into trouble .

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0.5X TBE is having less buffering capacity than1 X so 1X is minimum for running a gel and diff b/n TBE TAE is what i read is that when u r running a gel it generates huge amount of heat so buffer will exhaust some thing after some time at high volts compare to TBE TAE doesnt do this job so it is preferable, and
if u observe onething after some time u can see the evaporation on the top side of the tank ok this indicates evaporation takes place due to heat generation

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