The use of molecular protocols has expanded into virtually all branches of plant science in recent years, and crucial to these protocols is the effective isolation of plant nucleic acids in a purified state. Isolation of DNA from plant tissue must be simple, rapid, inexpensive, reproducible, and efficient, particularly when many samples are required, e.g., in population studies. The increasing use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based technology in plant molecular biology, especially in transgenic analysis, genetic mapping for genome analysis, and genetic fingerprinting, has placed further emphasis on the need for the efficient isolation of pure DNA, often from small amounts of plant tissue.
