I need to purify plasmids in high-throughput quantities and I'm trying to avoid spending thousands of dollars in the process. Our lab had been using Invitrogen 96-well plate kits for this in the past but the yields have been irregular. The alternatives (i.e., our usual choices of Qiagen or Machery-Nagel) are quite expensive but Genscript appears to be cheaper. Are they too cheap? We're just going to transform purified plasmids into E. coli.
Has anyone had noticeable issues with Genscript kits?
Hey Harry,
I used SDS gels and endotoxin detection and removal products of this company and they were really not good. And this explains, how they can be so cheap. Did you try products of Genaxxon from Germany? I used them in the past and they were quite ok.
Btw: is your plasmid a low or high copy one?
If you are using the Wizard 96 preps try pre-washing the binding plates with 3M NaOH.
If this does not improve the consistency of your yields you could try the EZNA range-we use them for everything now-gel extraction, minis and maxis (except ironically the HTP plate format minis because we have a large stock of the SV96 plates!) and we have good quality DNA from them that we regularly use for transfections, sequencing etc.
We're just using high copy plasmids, so no worries there.
It looks like Genaxxon doesn't make a 96-purification kit but I will keep them in mind for the future. We're in the US but the current exchange rates mean some kits may be cheaper than usual. If the other Genscript products give poor results then I'm suspicious of their prep kits.
I wasn't familiar with the Omega EZNA products but it looks like they might work very well.
The ZR Plasmid Miniprep Classic kit from Genesee Scientific is a cost-efficient alternative in my opinion. With some effort, you can get the price down to under $1 a prep. You can also buy replacement miniprep columns from Genesee that will work well with miniprep reagents/solutions that you make yourself in bulk for even greater cost savings.
- Badges
- Science topic