Lithium acetate

Lithium acetate (LiCH₃COO) is a salt of lithium and acetic acid.

Uses

Lithium acetate is used in the laboratory as buffer for gel electrophoresis of DNA and RNA. It has a lower conductivity and can be run at higher speeds than can gels made from TAE (5-30V/cm as compared to 5-10V/cm). At a given voltage, the heat generation and thus the gel temperature is much lower than with TAE buffers, therefore the voltage can be increased to speed up electrophoresis so that a gel run takes only a fraction of the usual time. Downstream applications, such as isolation of DNA from a gel slice or Southern blot analysis, work as expected when using lithium acetate gels.

Lithium boric acid or sodium boric acid are usually preferable to LA or TAE when analyzing smaller fragments of DNA (less than 500 bp) due to the higher resolution of borate-based buffers in this size range as compared to acetate buffers.

References

* Analytical Biochemistry 2004; 333: 1-13.

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