Lithium borate

Lithium borate (Li2B4O7) is the lithium salt of boric acid.

Uses
Lithium borate can be used in the laboratory as buffer for gel electrophoresis of DNA and RNA. It has a lower conductivity, produces crisper resolution, and can be run at higher speeds than can gels made from TBE or TAE (5-50V/cm as compared to 5-10V/cm). At a given voltage, the heat generation and thus the gel temperature is much lower than with TBE/TAE buffers, therefore the voltage can be increased to speed up electrophoresis so that a gel run takes only a fraction of the usual time. Downstream applications, such as isolation of DNA from a gel slice or Southern blot analysis, work as expected with lithium boric acid gels. Lithium borate is also an ingredient for use in making glasses and ceramics.

The recipe for 1 liter of 20X lithium borate (LB) DNA electrophoresis buffer is as follows: To 950 mL of dH2O, add 8.392 g of lithium hydroxide monohydrate and 36 g of boric acid, pH should be near 8.2. Adjust volume to 1 L and filter sterilize. This yields a final working concentration of ~10 mM lithium borate and a pH of 8.5. No EDTA is used because this would increase conductivity and is unnecessary in most applications.(adapted from )

Sodium borate is similar to lithium borate and has nearly all of its advantages at a somewhat lower cost, but the lithium buffer permits use of even higher voltages due to the lower conductivity of lithium ions as compared to sodium ions.