Can Gel Electrophoresis find which molecule a plant uses for pigment?

[deleted-398597]

can some one please explain the process of using your gel electrophoresis chamber to determine if two different types of plants use the same molecule for pigment. or maybe the result of it....PLEASE!!

[donnahardy2]

Hi,

Welcome to Science Buddies!

Are you thinking about doing this great project from this website? The experiment uses a gel electrophoresis box to separate dyes from different candies.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... background

To adapt this project to plant pigments, you need to do a little more background research.

What plant pigments were you thinking about trying to separate? The artificial pigments in candies usually have a strongly charged group such as sulfonate, such as red dye 40:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allura_Red_AC

Many plant pigments do not have a charged group in the structure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthocyanin

Electrophoresis involves using electricity to separate molecules by charge and by size. Since many plant pigments don’t have a charged group (+ or -), electrophoresis is not a suitable separation method to use.

However, there are other techniques used to separate plant pigments, like solvent extraction and chromatography. Please let me know if you want to do an electrophoresis project, or if you want to separate plant pigments. If you are interested only in plant pigments, what plants or pigments do you want to purify? Remember that most good science projects have a good purpose behind them.

Please let me know if you have any questions on my explanation of the difference between artificial pigments and plant pigments.

Donna Hardy