Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Ok so I did the building the gel electrophoresis chamber with food dye. I still dont get what bands are. Is it the differrnt shades the food color changes when it runs? What if just stays as one? I'm so confused. ! My ptoject is due in a couple days and if you could answer asap it would help tons. Thank you

lol yeah its the different color bands you get (im doing same experiment) oh by the way what did you do as the control?

oh cool! would you mind sharing your results so i can compare mine to yours? idk i have a weird feeling i did something wrong

Hi,

I assume the project you are talking about doing is this one: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ml#summary.

The point of this project is that most of the food colors we see are made by mixing multiple food dyes. Each of these food dyes has a different weight, and we can use gel electrophoresis to separate out these dyes by their weight. So when you run the food dyes from a green M&M (for example), you will see multiple bands of different colors at different places on the gel, and these are the different dyes used to make your green color. If you only get one band on the gel, than that implies that there was only one food dye used to make your food color. You also would have only one band in your controls, which should be a food dye alone, not dyes isolated from a candy.

I hope this helps explain your results. Please feel free to post here again if you have more questions!
JMP