We have finally finished the DNA extraction for most of the project species. This was not an easy task considering the different origin of the samples: bear’s blood and muscle, lizard’s muscle, butterfly’s head and thorax, frog skin and sturgeon fin tissue.
We tested mainly two methods: extraction through Phenol/Chloroform/IAA and PureLink ® Genomics mini kit. The first method uses a mix of organic molecules to purify DNA from proteins. It can extract DNA from a great amount of tissue, but with lower purity. The second method is a kit that uses a spin columns-based centrifugation procedure. This method allows to obtain cleaner samples but it requires the use of a smaller amount of tissue, and thus produces a smaller DNA yield. We applied both methods to each sample and we assessed their performance with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of isolated DNA. In particular we run gel electrophoresis and we did spectrophotometer and Qubit analysis. We conclude that the kit performed better for the older samples (such as the bear muscle samples, collected 10 years ago or more), whereas both methods were good for the other more recent samples. Now we are ready to run our first Illumina flow cell on the NovaSeq6000 in Florence!
ENDEMIXIT 