Metagenomic DNA/RNA from human tissue samples
 

Hi,

Is anyone extracting microbial DNA/RNA from human (or animal) tissue? I've got some kidney biopsies that I want to look at the microbiome but I'm not having much luck in finding a protocol to isolate the nucleic acids. Any advice, kit recommendations etc would be gratefully received.

Thanks,

Claire

NEBNext microbiome DNA enrichment kit

Do you mean extraction or enrichment of microbial DNA/RNA? For extraction, we've been using the AllPrep kit from Qiagen with reasonable success.

@nucacidhunter, how much enrichment do you see using the NEBNext? We've had pretty limited success (~20-40%), depending on sample.

Enrichment of microbial RNA seems trickier - I haven't heard of anything besides the theoretical "you can use an array to pull out human RNA".

I have not used them but following paper has compared NEBNext Microbiome DNA Enrichment Kit and the Molzym MolYsis Basic kit. They use different strategies for DNA enrichment.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27237775