A nontoxic and versatile protein salting-out method for isolation of DNA

A pivotal technique in basic and applied molecular biology is the isolation of DNA. However, the present DNA extraction methods are either toxic, expensive, time-consuming and laborious or restricted to certain applications. Here we describe a nontoxic and versatile protein salting-out method for convenient and rapid extraction of large as well as small DNA molecules from vertebrate cells and plasmid DNA from bacteria. Easy and relatively imprecise manipulations of a large number of samples result in high yields of pure mammalian and plasmid DNA that are suitable for transformation of bacteria, restriction enzyme analyses, Southern blotting, end labeling of DNA, PCR and sequencing.