Determination of Bacteriophage Genome Size by Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis

Standard agarose gel electrophoresis is extensively used to resolve DNA fragments from 0.2 to 40–50 kb. Larger fragments of genomic DNA or whole viral genomes can only effectively be resolved by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), which extends the range of molecular separation from 200 bp to 12 Mb.