The price of DNA Ladders - How to Find Cheap Affordable DNA Ladders for Gels?

[branthwaite]

£84 it cost for Hyperladder IV
anyone Know of a cheap supplier

[admin]

Hi there,
having lived part of my life as a lab rat I know there are many factors that affect the cost of DNA ladder including company/supplier, type of ladder ie number of bands, range of bands, ability to estimate DNA concentration from bands etc.

I would do the following, try to find a cheap supplier of Lambda phage digest - this was some of the cheapest DNA ladder I ever found.

You don't need many bands, depending on your application you only need a few - but even for important PCR setup you could run cheap DNA ladder like Lambda with more expensive (or even borrowed one) and then after you can calculate the distance / ratio between the cheap ladder (even lambda or other DNA ladder with fewer bands)

SO after you know your band size, and where it will run on your cheap ladder - you can continue to run cheap ladder without the expensive ladder ever again (unless you change genes etc) - but even then you can simply use lambda and use distance to estimate bands.