Am 15.02.2010, 07:04 Uhr, schrieb WS <novalidaddr...@nurfuerspam.de>:
Dear Colleagues, I thought of home-making a small semi dry blotter. I noticed that in some devices, one electrode is made of stainless steel, the other one of titanium. Or could one use titanium for both electrodes? In my experience, by accidentally reversing the current, the steel plate becomes oxidized - is the steel plate just a way of saving costs? I wonder about the electric connections (probably soldering is *not* good (tin will be prone to corrosion), stainless steel resp. titanium wire and screws either of the same material or non-conductive plastic should be the best choice) and the orientation of the electrodes - which one is anode and which one is cathode? Is there anything important about the housing?
My guess is that you will get corrosion problems with metals in general, as in effect you build an electrochemical cell. Therefore, the anode will tend to go. That's why all instrument I have ever seen use graphite as electrode material.
Depending on your purpose you may be better off with a tank blotter. They are easy to build and blotting yield tends to be higher than semidry (at least with the large membrane proteins I am dealing with). The only situation where I would consider semidry is when I want anode and kathode buffers to be different (e.g., detergent on the gel and methanol on the membrane side).
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