Guanidine thiocyanate
CAS# 593-84-0

Part 2: In-depth development

Guanidine thiocyanate is one of the cheapest and easiest to prepare for guanidine salts. Guanidine Thiocyanate is an ultrapure, molecular biology grade reagent. It is free of detectable nuclease and protease activity and is a strong protein denaturant, as both the guanidinium cation and the thiocyanate anion are chaotropic agents. It is provided in one bottle containing 500 g. It is recommended for the isolation of RNA, especially for tissues such as the pancreas with high levels of RNase activity. In solution, it is known as guanidinium thiocyanate. Guanidine Thiocyanate is thoroughly tested for contaminating nonspecific endonuclease, exonuclease, and RNase activity.

It is mainly used for biomedicine, chemical reagents.

Guanidine thiocyanate is a potent protein denaturant (stronger than guanidine HCl) often used in the isolation of intact ribonucleic acid to eliminate RNase activity. RNase can recover activity after boiling but is irreversibly inactivated in a 4 M solution of guanidine thiocyanate. Such solutions, to which the reducing agent b-mercaptoethanol is often added, are used to inactivate RNAse when isolating RNA from tissues that are rich in RNase, such as the liver. Total nuclear and cytoplasmic RNA may be isolated this way. A protocol for extracting RNA with guanidine isothiocyanate has been published.

In the presence of guanidine thiocyanate, proteins dissolve readily, cellular structures disintegrate and nucleoproteins dissociate from nucleic acids, as protein secondary structure is lost.