High-quality genomic DNA from human whole blood and mononuclear cells

摘要

The development of efficient and cost-effective technologies for DNA extraction will become of paramount importance considering the thousands of patients and control samples that eventually will be analyzed to identify disease-causing genes and for new drug targets. Moreover, genetic testing for early detection of viral genomes and bacterial contamination of donors' blood is also being universally implemented to assure the greatest safety of blood products and to decrease transfusion risks. Human genomic DNA isolation by classical protocols has always been a tedious, laborious, and time-consuming procedure involving protease digestion, organic solvent extraction, alcohol precipitation, and centrifugation (12). This multi-step method is largely unsuitable for high-throughput screening. Recently, several efforts have been made to develop simpler procedures both for genomic (7,8,14) and viral DNA (3,4,6,13) extraction from biological specimens (5). Several methods have been developed to meet these needs, but in most cases the high cost and limited versatility make them unsuitable to be employed in large-scale screening.