Uses
TAE (Tris-acetate-EDTA) buffer is used as both a running buffer and in agarose gel. Its use in denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis methods for broad-range mutation analysis has also been described. TAE has been used at various concentrations to study the mobility of DNA in solution with and without sodium chloride. However, high concentration of sodium chloride (and many other salts) in a DNA sample retards its mobility. This may lead to incorrect interpretations of the resulting DNA banding pattern.
Compared with TBE buffer, TAE buffer offers advantages in subsequent enzymatic applications for the DNA sample. For example, if a DNA sample is going to be used in a cloning experiment, the step that follows its running on an agarose gel is to ligate (covalently link) to a cloning vector (most likely a plasmid). DNA sample from TAE Buffer is suitable for this purpose, while DNA from TBE buffer is not. Borate in the TBE buffer is a strong inhibitor for many enzymes. This enzyme inhibiting property made TBE buffer very popular in its realm for two reasons. First, a DNA sample run in a TBE buffer can better keep its integrity. The other main reason is that the purpose for many agarose gel electrophoreses is to analyze the size of DNA molecules.
Read more about this topic: TAE Buffer