Jim Schneider,professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, recently received a 3-year, or $295000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop fresh strategies to rapidly separate and analyze long (kilobase) DNA strands,using surfactants rather than polymeric gels. These faster analysis techniques can impact a wide range of genomic DNA analyses, such as genome mapping, or where rapid processing of kilobase-length DNA is required. While conventional pulsed-field electrophoresis methods hold days to separate kilobase-length DNA,Schneider's fresh methods will hold less than five minutes and use inexpensive, reusable materials.
Source: phys.org