Lithium acetate
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| Identifiers | |
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| ECHA InfoCard | 100.008.105 |
PubChem CID
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CompTox Dashboard (EPA)
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| Properties | |
| C2H3LiO2 | |
| Molar mass | 65.98 g·mol−1 |
| Appearance | crystal |
| Density | 1.26 g/cm3 |
| Melting point | 286 °C |
| 45.0 g/100 mL[1] | |
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa).
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Lithium acetate (CH3COOLi) is a salt of lithium and acetic acid.
Uses
Lithium acetate is used in the laboratory as buffer for gel electrophoresis of DNA and RNA. It has a lower electrical conductivity and can be run at higher speeds than can gels made from TAE buffer (5-30V/cm as compared to 5-10V/cm). At a given voltage, the heat generation and thus the gel temperature is much lower than with TAE buffers, therefore the voltage can be increased to speed up electrophoresis so that a gel run takes only a fraction of the usual time. Downstream applications, such as isolation of DNA from a gel slice or Southern blot analysis, work as expected when using lithium acetate gels.
Lithium boric acid or sodium boric acid are usually preferable to lithium acetate or TAE when analyzing smaller fragments of DNA (less than 500 bp) due to the higher resolution of borate-based buffers in this size range as compared to acetate buffers.
Lithium acetate is also used to permeabilize the cell wall of yeast for use in DNA transformation.
References
- ^ Lide, David R. (1998). Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (87 ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. p. 465. ISBN 0-8493-0594-2.
- Brody, JR; Kern, SE (2004). "History and principles of conductive media for standard DNA electrophoresis". Analytical Biochemistry. 333 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1016/j.ab.2004.05.054. PMID 15351274.