Development of a chamber system for rapid, high yield and cost-effective purification of deoxyribonucleic acid fragments from agarose gel.
BACKGROUND
There are several methods commonly practicing for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) purification from agarose gel. In most laboratories, especially in developing countries, present methods for recovering of DNA fragments from the gel are mostly involved organic solvents. However, manual purification using organic solvents are toxic, labor intensive, time consuming and prone to contamination owing to several handling steps. The above mentioned burdens as well as cost and long time to import them, especially in developing countries, prompted us to design and develop a chamber system for rapid, non-toxic, cost-effective and user friendly device for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products purification from agarose gel.


METHODS
The device was made from plexiglass plates. After amplification of two fragments of 250 and 850 bp, PCR products were electrophoresed. Subsequently, the desired bands were excised and purified with three method: HiPer Mini chamber, phenol extraction method and spin column procedure. To assess the suitability of the purified DNAs, restriction digestion was applied.


RESULTS
Results showed that the yield of recovered DNA in our method was above 95%, whereas the yields obtained with conventional phenol extraction and spin column methods were around 60%.


CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, the current method for DNA elution is quick, inexpensive and robust and it does not require the use of toxic organic solvents. In addition, the purified DNA was well has suited for further manipulations such as restriction digestion, ligation, cloning, sequencing and hybridization.
Department of Parasitology and Mycology, Faculty of Medicine, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran.
Gilda
G
Eslami
Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
Rasoul
R
Salehi
Gel electrophoresis; phenol extraction; polymerase chain reaction product purification