Extra bands appear in RNA Ladders for a few reasons:
(1) RNA was not completely denatured. Electrophorese RNA under denaturing conditions. Use urea, formamide or formaldehyde gels, or glyoxal-treated RNA.
(2) Extra bands may be a result of using formaldehyde that is not fresh; the pH becomes acidic in older formaldehyde. In our hands, when fresh formaldehyde with neutral pH was used, the extra bands disappeared.
(3) Alternatively, if the extra bands appear after hybridization, it could be that the gel purified probe contains contaminating vector DNA (pUC or pBR) that hybridizes to RNA Ladder template DNA.