My one attempt at working with plant DNA when I was at the lab bench was trying to create a shotgun library from a rice BAC. Never have I needed to isolate nucleic acid from the source material, but based on my conversations with plant scientists, it can be problematic endeavor between the tough tissue and the compounds that can copurify during extraction and inhibit downstream applications. And if you want to isolate DNA or DNA from plant samples in an automated format, that just adds to the difficulties. Here I review an Applications in Plant Sciences article that compares DNA isolation using the Maxwell^® 16 System with two other methods on 25 different plant species samples. The authors note that Promega provided the Maxwell^® 16 instrument, DNA isolation cartridges and advice on its use. Continue reading “Extraction of Plant DNA Made Easy”