LPA is an inert coprecipitant used to aid recovery of nucleic acids during alcohol precipitations, essential for quantitative recovery of small amounts of nucleic acids in dilute solutions. LPA offers several advantages for recovering DNA or studying DNA-protein interactions, relative to other carriers, such as tRNA or glycogen. tRNA interferes with DNA during phosphorylation with polynucleotide kinase and glycogen competes with protein in DNA-protein interaction studies. In contrast, LPA is completely inert, synthesized chemically, therefore is not contaminated with biological material. This makes it ideal for use upstream of RT-PCR.
LPA has been shown to precipitate picogram amounts of DNA fragments larger than 20 base pairs while failing to precipitate shorter fragments and free nucleotides. Linear acrylamide is useful for separating reaction products from unincorporated nucleotides and from most oligonucleotide primers. It may be the most appropriate coprecipitant to use when precipitating DNA and RNA for PCR and RT-PCR reactions since small amounts of contaminating nucleic acids present in other carriers could be amplified.
LPA should be used at a final working concentration of 10-20 µg/ml. It will not interfere with A260/280 readings.