Abstract
A fast, very simple and efficient method of DNA extraction is described which takes advantage of DNA sedimentation induced by millimolar concentrations of ZnCl2. The zinc-induced sedimentation is furthermore strongly promoted by submillimolar phosphate anion concentrations. Within <30 min, the method recovers >90% of DNA irrespective of whether a plasmid DNA or short oligonucleotides are the extracted material. The method works with plasmid DNA and oligonucleotide concentrations as low as 100 ng/ml and 10 microg/ml, respectively, without using any expensive facilities or toxic chemicals.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (20.0 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Bernués J., Beltrán R., Casasnovas J. M., Azorín F. Structural polymorphism of homopurine--homopyrimidine sequences: the secondary DNA structure adopted by a d(GA.CT)22 sequence in the presence of zinc ions. EMBO J. 1989 Jul;8(7):2087–2094. doi: 10.1002/j.1460-2075.1989.tb03617.x. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Chang P. K., Natori M. 'One for all scales' methods for plasmid, phagemid and bacteriophage DNAs preparation. J Biotechnol. 1994 Aug 31;36(3):247–251. doi: 10.1016/0168-1656(94)90156-2. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Fazakerley G. V. Zinc Z-DNA. Nucleic Acids Res. 1984 Apr 25;12(8):3643–3648. doi: 10.1093/nar/12.8.3643. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Hengen P. N. Carriers for precipitating nucleic acids. Trends Biochem Sci. 1996 Jun;21(6):224–225. doi: 10.1016/0968-0004(96)30023-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Laundon C. H., Griffith J. D. Cationic metals promote sequence-directed DNA bending. Biochemistry. 1987 Jun 30;26(13):3759–3762. doi: 10.1021/bi00387a003. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Nickol J., Rau D. C. Zinc induces a bend within the transcription factor IIIA-binding region of the 5 S RNA gene. J Mol Biol. 1992 Dec 20;228(4):1115–1123. doi: 10.1016/0022-2836(92)90319-f. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Santos M. A. An improved method for the small scale preparation of bacteriophage DNA based on phage precipitation by zinc chloride. Nucleic Acids Res. 1991 Oct 11;19(19):5442–5442. doi: 10.1093/nar/19.19.5442. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Woisard A., Fazakerley G. V., Guschlbauer W. Z-DNA is formed by poly (dC-dG) and poly (dm5C-dG) at micro or nanomolar concentrations of some zinc(II) and copper(II) complexes. J Biomol Struct Dyn. 1985 Jun;2(6):1205–1220. doi: 10.1080/07391102.1985.10507633. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
