Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 5, 2026

An Efficient Method for the Isolation of Highly Purified RNA from Seeds for Use in Quantitative Transcriptome Analysis
Published on: January 11, 2017
Characterisation by molecular hybridization of RNA fragments isolated from ancient (1400 B.C.) seeds
1Dipartimento di Biologia Cellulare, Università di Camerino, Via F. Camerini 2, I-62032, Camerino, Italy.
Abstract:
The analysis of cress seeds from Thebes dated approximately 1400 years B.C. showed that fragments of RNA up to 10 bases in length were still present in the ancient seeds. After having been made radioactive at the 5'OH terminus, the RNA fragments were used as probes in a spot hybridization experiment. They were shown to hybridize to cress DNA and, to a lesser extent, to that of phylogenetically distant species. When fixed onto nitrocellulose and probed with different cloned genes, the RNA fragments were shown to originate from breakage of the 25 and 18s cytoplasmic rRNA.
Related Concept Videos
Southern Blot
Denatured DNA fragments must be transferred onto a carrier membrane from the gel to make it accessible to a probe - a small ssDNA fragment complementary to the target DNA...
In-situ Hybridization
Types of probes and labels
A probe is a complementary strand of DNA or RNA that binds to corresponding nucleotide sequences in a cell. Many...
RNA-seq
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while...
Conditions on Early Earth
DNA Isolation
Complementary DNA

