Hi everybody,
Why does ssM13 DNA degrade upon heating to 95'C for 30 min???
We are seeing a strange thing happening in our lab. We have ssM13 DNA,
commercial and self purified. Both samples are stable at room temperature and
form a nice band on an agarose gel. If we heat the DNA to 95'C for 30 min, it
gets completely degraded and all we see on the agarose gel is a smear. We use a
TBE buffer for the gel and that is the same for both cases. The DNA is kept in
TE buffer, also both the same. We stumbled across this phenomenon while
attempting to do G-methylation (using DMS). First we thought something in the
process is wrong, so we used just untreated DNA from the stock and heated it -
same result.
Is there some thermophile nuclease copurified with the DNA? Why is it also in
the commercial sample?
If anybody has any idea what's going on, please e-mail me or post on bionet
general.
Thanks a lot,
Peter Ahnert.
The Ohio State University
Department of Biochemistry
E-mail: Ahnert.1 at osu.edu
Fax: 614-292-6773
Tel: 614-292-3319
