When a borax-water solution is mixed with P.V.A glue it will harden forming a putty.īorax is used as a food additive in some countries with the E number E285, but is banned in the United States. Borax is also a good flux for 'pre-tinning' tungsten with zinc - making the tungsten soft-solderable. It allows the molten solder to flow evenly over the joint in question. Borax is also used mixed with water as a flux when soldering jewelry metals such as gold or silver. It lowers the melting point of the unwanted iron oxide ( scale), allowing it to run off. However, lithium borate is much more expensive.Ī mixture of borax and ammonium chloride is used as a flux when welding iron and steel. Lithium borate is similar to sodium borate and has all of its advantages, but permits use of even higher voltages due to the lower conductivity of lithium ions as compared to sodium ions. Borate buffers (usually at pH 8) are also used as preferential equilibration solution in DMP-based crosslinking reactions. Downstream applications, such as isolation of DNA from a gel slice or southern blot analysis, work as expected with sodium borate gels. At a given voltage, the heat generation and thus the gel temperature is much lower than with TBE or 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. It has a lower conductivity, produces sharper bands, and can be run at higher speeds than can gels made from TBE buffer or TAE buffer (5–35 V/cm as compared to 5–10 V/cm). Sodium borate is used in biochemical and chemical laboratories to make SB buffers, e.g. The origin of the name is traceable to the Medieval Latin borat, which comes from the Arabic buraq, which comes from either the Persian burah or the Middle Persian burak.

Boron borax