A silica sands-based method for faithful analysis of microbial communities and DNA isolation from a wide range of species

ABSTRACT

A silica sands-based method has been developed to isolate high quality genomic DNAs from cells of animals, plants and microorganisms, such as Hemisalanx prognathus, Spinacia oleracea, Pichia pastoris, Bacillus licheniformis and Escherichia coli. To the best of our knowledge, no DNA isolation method has so wide application until now. In addition, this method and a commercially available kit were compared in analysis of microbial communities using high-throughput 16s rDNA sequencing. As a result, the silica sands-based method was found to be even more efficient in isolating genomic DNA from gram-positive bacteria than the kit, indicating that it would become a very valuable choice to faithfully reflect the composition of microbial communities.

KEYWORDS:

• 16S rDNA sequencing
• environmental microorganisms
• genomic DNA extraction
• gram-positive bacteria
• microbial communities
• soil microorganisms

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank Promdonkoy Patcharee and Darren J Hart for helpful discussions and review of this manuscript. This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundations of China (No. 31100045, No. 31270114 and No. 31471713), Program for Liaoning Excellent Talents in University (No. LR2014018), and Liaoning BaiQianWan Talents Program (No. 2015-40).