integrity vs purity

Always remember that nucleic acids purity and integrity are not reffering to the same thing, and both are critical and ought to be check after the nucleic acids extraction and purification.

Lot of researchers or graduate students thought that their purified DNA or RNA are of optimum quality merely based on the great A260/A280 and/ or A260/A230 ratio (s), without checking the nucleic acids integrity, which can be checked via agarose gel electrophoresis or capillary electrophoresis.

Changes are, you can get a highly pure nucleic acids but totally degraded nucleic acids, which might contribute to error and bias to your downstream quantitative and/ or qualitative assay such as PCR.