Recently my project required me to make deletion constructs of the promoter I study and to clone them into luciferase constructs. As usual, I felt a lot of pressure to get the job done, but I had very limited experience with cloning, therefore I needed every trick in the book to make the process as painless as possible. A Millipore representative had given me some free samples of the Montage Gel Extraction Kit that I gladly accepted but immediately placed in the drawer I stick all my free-bees.
After designing primers that would allow me to delete my construct as needed, performing PCR and restriction enzyme digest, it came down to the point of running my products on the gel and excising the DNA from the gel. I was about to use another companies’ gel extraction kit but realized that it required at least 3 buffers and the need for me to heat the DNA gel complex in a buffer for 1 hour (not to mention the time it took to prepare the water bath for the incubation). It was a very time consuming and inconvenient process.
Then I realized I had the free samples of the Millipore Montage Gel Extraction Kit and I thought I would give them a try. The process was amazingly simple – I literally cut out the piece of gel containing my DNA product, dropped it into the gel nebulizer and filter device and spun the sample for 10 minutes in a table top centrifuge at maximum speed to yield the DNA of interest separated from the agarose gel. I could not believe the ease, the time saved and effectiveness of this product.
The kit comes with a three-part pre-assembled DNA device that includes: a nebulizer, a filter and a microcentrifuge tube. The kit also comes with a 500ml bottle of 50X TAE to use when preparing the agarose gel. The filter can be used to isolate DNA from 100 to 10,000 base pairs from an agarose gel for applications such as cloning, sequencing or radioisotropic labeling.
I would recommend this product to anyone who needed to excise DNA from gel, there is no reason to use a water bath, several buffers or waste more time than 10 minutes to do so. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give this product a 9 for effectiveness, cost and reliability.
Sharon Yavrom
Graduate Student
University of Southern California