All I have ever used in New Zealand is Qiagen's DNeasy Plant Mini Kit - and it worked a treat - even for an extinct plant (Lepidium obtusatum) using specimens 110 years old.  I also found that kit excellent for extracting DNA from herbarium specimens of some New Zealand Ranunculaceae. Probably not much help beyond a unashamedly product endorsement!

We use InnuPREP Plant DNA Kit” (Analytic Jena AG, Germany) and it does its job. We work with alot of old herbarium material. Sorry can´t say anything about the other kids.

Best

Tobias

Thanks Peter and Tobias!

Dear Keir,

Did you have success with the GeneJet kits? I am having trouble extracting usable DNA from old herbarium specimens with this kit and wondered if you had perhaps modified the protocol with success.

Kind regards,

Wesley

Hi Wesley, 

I did have moderate success using the GeneJET Plant Genomic DNA Purification kit, and compared it to Qiagen's DNeasy Plant kit. I did not modify the protocol. I found no consistent difference in yield (compared by sight on a EtBr gel) between the two kits. I did (perhaps not surprisingly) notice a big difference in yield when comparing samples homogenized by different methods and with different starting amounts: I got much more DNA when starting with ~15mg dry material (whether homogenized in liquid N2 with a mini-pestle or in a TissueLyser with a tungsten bead; 2 x 30sec @ 20Hz) than when I started with ~5mg.

Good luck! Please let me know if I can help in any way, provide more details, etc.

Are you using the extracted DNA for PCR and Sanger sequencing, or another application?