Dear Wesley,

Will you please contact Dr. Carole Sinou   ?

She has done molecular studies based on herbarium specimens.

I have attached one of her publications.

However, she takes time to reply.

Best wishes,

Subir.

Dear Subir,

Many thanks for the publication and the advice. I will most definitely contact her.

Kind regards,

Wesley

The results will depend on storage conditions of herbarium specimens and your special needs for current research. DNA in dried plants is often fragmented. Also, it  can be damaged by some chemicals and heating to kill insects.  But if you have not a need to get very long fragments or whole genome, in most cases you would get it isolated and amplified successfully. I used CTAB with several modifications and Qiagen DNAeasy Plant Kit with good results for 90 years old herbarium specimens (600-800bp. length)

Dear Andrii,

Thanks for the advice!! The vouchers I am attempting to extract from have not been poisoned, so that should not be an issue. I am looking at single regions. I will attempt to use the qiagen kits and hope for the best!

Hi Wesley, 

I would suggest trying one of the kits developed for forensic studies, they perform reasonably well with old and destroyed material. We normally use one of those if working with tiny samples. Just an idea...

Good luck in any case!

Hi Wesley! I agree with Andrii, I've used several kits to extract DNA from old herbaria material with poor success (unless liquid nitrogen is used). The best results I've got are with CTAB metod. I also use PGEM for clonning the sequences.  I've recently obtain sequences from ITS and LSU from a Tulostoma specimen of almost 100 years. 

I hope this information is useful. 

Good luck!