AG3D: A low-cost educational 3D printable toolkit for agarose gel electrophoresis

Access to desktop additive manufacturing is growing and the argument could be made for 3D printers to be standard laboratory equipment. The power of the printers lies in the democratisation of scientific equipment. Traditional agarose gel electrophoresis forms a cornerstone of molecular biology research, teaching and learning. Reliable electrophoresis is dependent on a number of factors which include standardized commercial equipment with respect to casting trays, combs, horizontal tanks and power supplies. The aforementioned systems come at a high initial cost; this is before factoring in the costs of standard electrophoresis grade agarose and associated reagent pricing. Here, we present a basic method for the additive manufacturing of a simple 3D printable agarose gel electrophoresis (AGE) unit with a built-in gel casting tray for standard size microscope slide-based AGE; named AG3D. The system presented was validated using different standard agarose-buffers (Tris Acetate EDTA and Tris Borate EDTA) and commercially available base-pair ladders. We provide a comparison between the AG3D and a commercial AGE system in respect to resolving power of the electrophoresis unit and discuss the overall reduction in cost afforded by the AG3D electrophoresis toolkit. The method presented has the potential for application in low resource educational environments by: Significantly lowering costs through the reduction of reagents (agarose, buffers etc). Allow for the use of low sample volumes. Providing an open-source toolkit for modification whether for research or teaching & learning Graphical abstract Specifications table