I am bead-beating coral tissue (containing intracellular algae, bacteria, the coral animal, and a brittle coral skeleton) for up to 5 minutes (with 1-minute cooling breaks every 40 seconds) in Trizol. I found an interesting relationship between the duration of bead beating and the 260/280 and 260/230 ratio - the longer I beat the samples the more the ratios are impacted (more protein, salts, phenol, or other contaminants in the RNA extract). It also appears that the quality of the extracts is related to the 340 absorbances.
What could be happening here? Is it possible that the coral skeleton buffers the acidic solution and therefore more proteins, salts, or phenol make it into the aqueous layer? Or potentially it allows the extraction of more starches or other contaminants? There seems to be a clear relationship with the 340 absorbance values.
I'd appreciate any thoughts related to this. Thanks in advance for your assistance :D.
The dots are far from the lines, so I'm not convinced on their shapes :)
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