An efficient method for DNA extraction from cyanobacteria isolated from hypersaline and marine environments

Cyanobacteria are ancient organisms surviving on the earth due to their simple nutritional requirements and ability to produce distinct secondary metabolites that can combat detrimental environmental impacts. In order to understand these abilities of cyanobacteria at the molecular level, it is necessary to extract high-quality genomic DNA. However, the presence of secondary metabolites and exopolysaccharides hinders the DNA extraction from these organisms, especially from hypersaline environments. Here we have developed and compared a new method with two known methods of DNA extraction from environmental isolates. The results clearly indicate that the new optimized method yielded large amount of DNA with high purity. Additionally, the extracted DNA showed reduced degradation and excellent overall quality, which can be used directly for downstream purposes such as PCR and sequencing.