DNA extractions from Armillaria

First update of the year:

From the last update you saw that we isolated some Armillaria cultures from mushrooms that we collected in the field. The rhizomorphs pictured below give us pretty good indication that we have cultured Armillaria. Thanks to the rhizomorphs stucture of this fungi, it is easier to cut the hyphae bundles out from the agar plates to do DNA extractions.

DNA extractions:

We cut out the rhizomorphs: fungal hyphae bundles as best we could from the agar plates. We then used a CTAB extraction protocol made for plant tissue just to test quality and quantity of DNA extracted.

Some preliminary results:

Overall, we got pretty good results from a first go at the DNA extraction protocol. Pictured below is a screenshot of the UV-Vis spectra of the samples. DNA concentration levels ranged from ~10ng/µl to ~200ng/µl. And 11/16 samples had acceptable 260/230 and 260/280 ratios. Some things I was looking at was bead material for lysis, number of beads, rhizomorph color, and amount of fungal tissue in each tube. Nothing stood out for this first run. We will be optimizing this protocol and DNA was saved for running some PCR priemrs in literature.