Efficiency of selected detergents for local nucleic acid extraction
Abstract
Nucleic acid analysis often requires nucleic acid extraction from the cells. Although nucleic acid extraction gets cheaper over time, the cost still remains high for low resource settings leading to dominance of theoretical experience especially in the academic system. A study to assess the performance of different locally available detergents under four major categories was conducted to establish the best category for adoption during nucleic acid extraction. The experimental method of kitchen DNA extraction was adopted for this investigation. The selected detergents were investigated on the amount of nucleic acids each would retrieve from the same quantity of sample. Different detergents led to different nucleic acid yield. Laundry detergents and dish washing detergents performed best, followed by multipurpose detergents and the hand washing detergents performed worst. Locally available household detergents, therefore, are suitable candidates for the application in the simple laboratory nucleic acid extraction leading to a low-cost procedure of nucleic acid extraction and their adoption in school and training environments could reduce the theoretical enrichment burden.