Nucleic acid isolation is the most technically demanding and laborious procedure performed in molecular diagnostics. Conventional procedures used to purify DNA from samples adsorbed to surfaces. Biological material must first be removed from these surfaces. This operation may result in inefficient recovery of small samples.
Purification procedure usually used phenol, chloroform and isopropyl alcohol. These hazardous organic chemicals, need multiple centrifugations and will result in significant loss of DNA, may affect the enzyme digestion of DNA or introduce amplification inhibitors.
A recent development in DNA purification is the use of magnetic beads covered with nucleic acid binding matrices. This method, the superior sensitivity allows rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases and detection of bacterial contamination of blood products, does not require any hazardous organic chemicals and centrifugations. The product can be used in PCR or enzyme digestion directly.
Magnetic particles can be applied in nucleic acid and protein purification, immunology, genetic combinations testing.
This method can prevent pollution in reagents and inhibitory factors that will affect the downstream operation. And it does not require any centrifugal progress, whose rate is much higher than other methods. The magnetic bead purification technology is now providing a new way for automatic nucleic acid/protein purification.