Ethidium bromide safety precautions in your lab - Just curious to see how they differ (Aug/10/2005 )

I tend to think that the hazards associated with EtBr are greatly overstated. If you look at the structure of EtBr, it is a huge, positively charged molecule... how is this going to penetrate cells and nucleus and interact with your DNA? This is what our lipid bilayer is for. I still take safety precautions, but mostly because I'm forced to. We're not even allowed to mix EtBr with our gel, so we have stain/destain dishes in a hood.

I have professors that preach the EtBr safety protocols, yet they talk about handling the stuff bare-handed when they were in grad school; so much so that when they went out to the "disco" they're fingers would glow orange under the blacklights! These profs are still alive and each one that that I've talked to has normal kids with two arms and two legs, and one head.

So yeah, contact with EtBr doesn't concern me too much. For those of you gung-ho against EtBr contact, check out this line I came across on a website describing the properties of EtBr:

"Description: Bitter tasting dark red crystals from alcohol (Budavari, 1989) "

Bitter tasting?! Wonder if he's still alive?

I prefer staining the gel in EtBr rather than adding it into the gel
Somehow I like the idea of staining and destaining the gel before viewing it under UV, add abit of suspense and excitement while waiting for result haha
By the way, my staining tank is under the sink in the lab. I hope that is fine haha

I prefer staining the gel in EtBr rather than adding it into the gel
Somehow I like the idea of staining and destaining the gel before viewing it under UV, add abit of suspense and excitement while waiting for result haha 
By the way, my staining tank is under the sink in the lab. I hope that is fine haha

Has EtBr ever been tested for it's mutagenic properties? I'm talking about a certain bacterial test for any chemical molecule, just can't think of the name, something like 'ames test'? For being mutagenic in this test, it would have to pass at least one lipid bilayer...

it takes much more time to stain and destain the gel. That's why i don't like it.

I tend to think that the hazards associated with EtBr are greatly overstated. If you look at the structure of EtBr, it is a huge, positively charged molecule... how is this going to penetrate cells and nucleus and interact with your DNA? This is what our lipid bilayer is for. I still take safety precautions, but mostly because I'm forced to. We're not even allowed to mix EtBr with our gel, so we have stain/destain dishes in a hood.

I have professors that preach the EtBr safety protocols, yet they talk about handling the stuff bare-handed when they were in grad school; so much so that when they went out to the "disco" they're fingers would glow orange under the blacklights! These profs are still alive and each one that that I've talked to has normal kids with two arms and two legs, and one head.

So yeah, contact with EtBr doesn't concern me too much. For those of you gung-ho against EtBr contact, check out this line I came across on a website describing the properties of EtBr:

"Description: Bitter tasting dark red crystals from alcohol (Budavari, 1989) "

  Bitter tasting?! Wonder if he's still alive?

forforfor:

Are you talking about separate EtBr stain/destain dishes? I don't like the fact that you have to wait 10 minutes to see your results either.

On a related note, I ran out some products from a real-time PCR reaction on a gel last week. I used SYBR green as my detection dye during the PCR and I was going to see if I could just view the gel w/o staining in EtBr. I'm assuming I could, but I forgot to test it out and stained in EtBr anyways (SUPER bright signal).

-Hank

If you're using EtBr baths to stain the gel, shut off the lights and irradiate the area around the baths with some UV, you'll get a nasty surprise. The only serious health problem with EtBr would be if some dried in, started floating around in the lab as dust particles and you inhale them. Now that...probably happens every day in every lab using EtBr! So just to minimize the exposure, make sure you only work with EtBr in a fume hood. And since gloves are abundant, why not change them? Sure, it's not that dangerous, but since I really can't see why someone should get a thrill out of handling it improperly just use common sense.

I turned on a UV light over the mouse/keyboard that our imaging system is hooked up to. Suprisingly I didn't detect any EtBr! Even though there is a huge sticker on the mouse and keyboard that says "NO GLOVES!" everyone seems to ignore it.