I've found the same when it comes to DIY agarose. Plenty of ways of
purifying agar to agarose, but unless you can distil propylene glycol
with your setup (hint: you probably can't!) then the cost of reagents
far outstrips the savings of buying and processing cheap agar.
However, I do think it's important that we have *ways of doing these
things* in the public domain. A little yak-shaving never hurt anyone,
and what if you live somewhere where dNTPs can't be bought for economic,
political reasons? What if you needed some for a critical medical
application?
I can only say that I've heard, anecdotally, that most dNTPs come from
Ireland's fisheries, because they're extracted from salmon sperm. I
don't know whether Salmon sperm is magically rich in dNTPs, or if you
have to process/charge them from dNDPs first.
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