Agrose gel:

Agrose gel has some disadvantages as a chromatographic material. There is a considerable amount of charged groups in the material. Because of the presence of charged groups, that is recommended to work at high ionic strength to mitigate the problem due to ion exchange effects. The other problem arises from the fact which agar chains are not linked through covalent bonds. This makes the agar gels chemically unstable. This amounts to the fact in which they are less stable to pH extremes than the gels define earlier. These gels manage their structure if the water is substituted by several organic solvents such as acetone or ethanol. The structure of agrose gels makes it impractical to dry and reswell them. Thus, once the gel has been prepared, it should be stored in wet state. It might be important to emphasize again that agrose gel have fractionation ranges at considerably higher molecular masses than expected by comparison with dextran and polyacrylamide gels. The selectivity curve of these gels is less steep than it is for the gels from dextran and polyacrylamide.