MBMAD@dlvh.daresbury.ac.uk (07/19/90)
Hello, we have been doing a lot of quantitative southern blotting recently and decided to buy one of the commercially available vacuum blotters, in fact the LKB/Pharmacia "Vacugene". Since we pressed this beast into use however the quality of our blots has plummeted!! In particular we seem to get a very high hybridisation signal appearing in the wells, this is dependent on the presence of a DNA sample and proportional to the quantity of DNA loaded. We have checked for the usual crud and muck which might cause this but we beleive our DNA to be as clean and pure as is reasonable to expect. We are worried that this signal represents REAL material and hence negates the quantitation that we have done when using good-old capillary methods. Does anyone have an explanation for this phenomenon?? A remedy??? Thanks in advance.........Mike Dalrymple MBMAD@uk.ac.dl.dlvh