When investigating the use of different polymers for capillary electrophoresis we found that poly-N,N-dimethylacrylamide (pDMA) has a very low viscosity compared to other polymers of comparable molecular mass and resolving power. This makes it a potentially useful matrix for DNA separation in multi-capillary electrophoresis, where short cycle times or low pressure for matrix replacement are preferred. We have characterized this matrix by systematic studies on concentration, chain length and field strength dependence. It is shown that pDMA performs well for the separation of oligonucleotides and double-stranded DNA fragments. Together with the application of DNA sequencing, pDMA is a universal polymer for the separation of biological macromolecules.