High-resolution nucleic acid detection using online polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis platform

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) is one of the most popular techniques for the separation and detection of nucleic acids. However, it requires a complicated detection procedure and offline detection format, which inevitably leads to band broadening and thus compromises the separation resolution. To overcome this problem, we developed an online PAGE (OPAGE) platform by integrating the gel electrophoresis apparatus with the gel imaging system, so as to obviate the need for the complicated detection procedure. Notably, OPAGE enabled the real-time monitoring of the separation process and the immediate imaging of the separation results once the electrophoresis ended. Using a series of synthetic DNAs with different lengths as samples, we demonstrated that the OPAGE platform enhanced 32-64 % of the number of theoretical plates, showed a robust dynamic range of 0.1-12.5 ng/mu L, and realized a limit of detection as low as 0.08 ng/mu L DNA. Based on our results, we anticipate that the OPAGE platform is a promising alternative to traditional nucleic acid gel electrophoresis for simple and high-resolution detection and quantification and nucleic acid.