Genomic DNA isolation from aromatic and medicinal plants growing in Turkey.

Abstract

Herbal and aromatic plants are attracting more attention among contemporary plant researchers because some human diseases resulting from bacterial antibiotic resistances have gained worldwide concern. A number of methods are available and are being developed for the isolation of nucleic acids from plants. Because plants contain high amounts of many different substances, it is unlikely that just one nucleic acid isolation method suitable for all plants can ever exist. Therefore, we developed 4 modified new methods that produced good quality DNA from these plants. This article deals with modern approaches in determining genetic variability, in which three categories of genetic markers are applied by morphological, biochemical and molecular. Furthermore, the aim is to assess the available genetic diversity for each species; to provide more accurate and detailed information than is available using classical phenotypic data in this subject. Various types of plant materials and a number of different protocols for the isolation of DNA were tested in order to obtain good quality DNA for PCR reactions. Ten populations of different aromatic and medicinal plants from Turkey were tested in the study. The number of plants examined for each population varied from two to five. When fresh or frozen leaves of plants collected in autumn were used for the isolation of DNA, no positive result in PCR reaction was obtained regardless of the isolation protocol being used. Four different DNA methods were compared for the isolation of DNA from the different plant homogenates, namely the CTAB, Plant Genomic DNA Purification Kit, and EZ1 Nucleic acid isolation methods and DNA extraction with phenol purification and liquid nitrogen method. Key words: Genomic DNA extraction, PCR, aromatic plants, medicinal plants.