I used chloroform alcohol stabelized for phase separation and then a qiagen miRNeasy kit. Has anyone been able to recover samples when they are organic contaminated? Can I run them through another column to clean up?
Have you tried to do 1-2 extractions with chloroform to eliminate phenol before Qiagen columns?. Normally it works.
You should be careful with the number of cells that you are using for extraction. If the number of cells is too small you can get phenol contamination in your samples, even when you extract afterwards with fancy kits.