Direct and simultaneous extraction of DNA and RNA from soil

Abstract

The direct extraction of DNA and RNA from soil is important for molecular ecological studies of the terrestrial environment. The structure and activities of natural bacterial communities can be better understood by analyses of their nucleic acids when the latter are recovered from soil samples by direct lysis instead of isolating them from bacterial cells, which have been separated from soil. One reason for this is that bacteria often are sticking strongly to soil particles and only part of them can be extracted [18, 30, 37]. On the other hand, most of the environmental bacteria, even when they are well extracted from the soil particles, fail to be cultured on laboratory media [6, 10, 44, 45]. In addition, the natural population densities of many bacteria could be rather low [22, 24].