Hi Paul,

I've used both the PowerWater, and Powersoil kits for water samples. I was extracting microbial DNA from water samples taken from deep coal seams and found that Powerwater gave better yields. I suspect that this is because the Powerwater kit requires you to filter your water sample and extract the DNA off of the filter. This way you don't dilute your lysis buffer with your water solution. However, some people find that the filters are cumbersome and worry about sterility since you must use forceps to handle them initially. We eventually adapted a powersoil kit for some of our samples (from oil wells that didn't filter well with PowerWater) that used larger volumes of the solutions than the written protocol, but this required us to purchase extra solutions and involved several extra spin steps to get the full volume over the filters.

Thanks, Cassandra