Nucleic Acid Extraction from Multiple Sample Types Application Note · SmartExtraction

Introduction

Modern molecular biology technologies are based on the manipulation and analysis of nucleic acids. Nucleic acids are part of each individual cell or viral particle. A prerequisite of molecular biology applications is the availability of nucleic acids in a certain content, a certain purity and integrity. Therefore, the sample material must be disintegrated by physical or chemical processes followed by the separation of the nucleic acids from other components of the sample material. Besides manual extraction of nucleic acids, automated extraction is of growing importance. This development is driven by growing sample numbers as well as the requirement for stringent documentation in highly regulated environments like hospitals or food safety laboratories. A drawback of automated nucleic acid extraction is that extracted DNA can be cross-contaminated with magnetic particles.

The presented method combines automated extraction with InnuPure® C16/C16 touch and SmartExtraction Technology. InnuPure® C16/C16 touch enables parallel extraction of up to 16 samples. Commonly used automated nucleic acid extraction technologies rely on binding of the nucleic acid to silica-coated magnetic particles. Automated SmartExtraction-Technology omits magnetic particles by binding the DNA to the Smart Modified Surface of macro beads, which are located within a disposable and filtered pipette tip called Smart Modified Tip. Using a Smart Modified Tip makes the classical steps of nucleic acid purification — binding, washing, elution — as easy as simple up and down pipetting.

This application note describes the extraction of DNA from bacteria, yeast and blood cells using the smart DNA prep (a) and smart Blood DNA Midi prep (a) kits on InnuPure® C16.

SmartExtraction Technology based kits allow the use of large sample volumes (e.g. 109 bacterial cells, 3 ml blood) resulting in high DNA yields. Besides impressive yields, quality of extracted DNA is excellent.