History of electrophoresis

The history of electrophoresis for molecular separation and chemical analysis began with the work of Arne Tiselius in 1931, while new separation processes and chemical speciation analysis techniques based on electrophoresis continue to be developed in the 21st century.^[1] Tiselius, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, developed the "Tiselius apparatus" for moving-boundary electrophoresis, which was described in 1937 in the well-known paper "A New Apparatus for Electrophoretic Analysis of Colloidal Mixtures".^[2] The method spread slowly until the advent of effective zone electrophoresis methods in the 1940s and 1950s, which used filter paper or gels as supporting media. By the 1960s, increasingly sophisticated gel electrophoresis methods made it possible to separate biological molecules based on minute physical and chemical differences, helping to drive the rise of molecular biology. Gel electrophoresis and related techniques became the basis for a wide range of biochemical methods, such as protein fingerprinting, Southern blot, other blotting procedures, DNA sequencing, and many more.^[3]