Plasmid Purification Technology
Purification of plasmids, circular pieces of DNA that replicate independently from the chromosome and can be engineered to carry and express any desired gene sequence, is a fundamental technique of synthetic biology and something that we take for granted in our lab. We use commercially available (and relatively expensive) kits that have been optimized to get a lot of DNA out of bacterial cells with relative ease. There are some people who still use the old, time-consuming, toxic chemical method of DNA purification, but many more who are working on making the process easier, cheaper, and faster. A new paper in PLoS ONE describes just such a method, one third of the price of the commercial kit and much faster. The new protocol is not much different from the kit, but it can be done using common lab supplies instead of the proprietary plastic tubes, using glass syringe filters to capture and wash the DNA, which can then be released by running water through the filter.
This is the kind of work that isn’t quite as glamorous as some things in synthetic biology seem, but making experimental work easier, faster, and cheaper is critical to developing the engineering of biology. Now the only question that remains is, how would this method stack up against my lab in The Miniprep Challenge?
