Ten-minute purification of PCR products by continuous elution electrophoresis.

We optimized continuous elution electrophoresis (CEE) for rapid purification of PCR products. After PCR amplification, the reaction mixture is applied directly to CEE, and then the PCR products in the size range from 200 to 1500 bp are purified within nearly 10 min. CEE is able to separate two DNA fragments differing in length by 50 bp. As judged by ligation efficiency, the quality of PCR products separated by CEE is equal to that purified by extraction from the melting gels. CEE reduces operational time because purification of the PCR products is a repetitional procedure in recombinant DNA techniques.