M. luteus can be found in many places such as the human skin, water, dust, and soil. Micrococcus is generally thought of as harmless bacterium, but there have been rare cases of Micrococcus infections in people with compromised immune systems, as occurs with HIV patients.
Therefore when used in gel electrophoresis, markers effectively provide a logarithmic scale by which to estimate the size of the other fragments (providing the fragment sizes of the marker are known). Protein, DNA, and RNA markers with pre-determined fragment sizes and concentrations are commercially available.
Gel electrophoresis can separate fragments of DNA that were cut with restriction enzymes, creating a visual map of fragment size thatâs easy to interpret. Or scientists may use gel electrophoresis to separate a protein they want to study from other proteins in a cell. One of the advantages of gel electrophoresis is that scientists can separate several samples side by side so they can compare them. The comparison of separated DNA molecules is the basic method behind the DNA fingerprints that forensic scientists use to compare samples from crime scenes with those of suspects.