I am working on advancing microbial detection from tissue and cell-based medical devices. I was looking for kits or protocols that use binding to histones to remove human DNA after the cell lysis stage, but I have not found any publications on such a method.
This seems an obvious target so I would assume it has been tried.
I would appreciate any information.
Thank you.
KW
In theory, you could target the histone-DNA interactions in human cells to selectively remove or isolate human DNA. However, there are some challenges:
- Non-specific binding: Histones are involved in interactions with both the human DNA (in the chromatin) and microbial DNA (though much less tightly), so using histone binding to differentiate between the two may not be straightforward.
- Microbial DNA isolation: Microbial DNA, being in the form of plasmids or single, unwrapped strands, does not generally bind to histones, making it less likely to be selectively removed through histone-DNA interactions.
Yes of course the targeting of histones that could still be a promising avenue of investigation.
Why would you need to remove the human DNA? PCR is sensitive enough to detect microbial DNA in a mixed sample. And most folks *include* a human DNA target as a positive control that their DNA extraction protocol was successful when using a mixed sample (like the qPCR test for COVID-19).
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