Marcus Schmidt wrote:
>[snip]
> agree with you in the absolute necessity of bead beating - part of my
> experimental work had been devoted to the detection of Bacillus
> endospores, and bead beating proved to be the only way to crack them up.
>I have never done any PCR on soil/mud, but have read some papers on it.
Our interest is mycobacteria, which can be cultured from soil. But I
have never seen a paper on amplification of their DNA from soil (even
those papers using generic eubacterial 16S primers).
Mycobacteria have a thick, hydrophobic cell wall. Would current methods
fail to lyse these bugs and therefore select against mycobacteria?
BTW, you can lyse cultured mycobacteria using a bead-beater, but
sonication is much better.
Koen De Smet
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