Why does a higher amount of DNA precipitate from animal substances than from a vegetable during DNA extraction?
I assume you weighed out the same mass of each sample before you did the extraction, because obviously, if you used 10 grams of sheep liver and 3 grams of carrot, you’d get more DNA out of the sheep liver sample… Otherwise, it could have to do with: 1. Water content. If the carrot had more water, gram for gram, you’d get less cells from the carrot. 2. Carrot cells are bigger/more massive, so gram for gram, you get less cells from the carrot. 3. Carrot cells have less DNA / cell. 4. Because of the cell wall, you may not have lysed open the carrot cells as efficiently as the animal ones. I’m not sure what the answer is (or if any of what I’ve thought of is true), but to address them, you could: 1. Dry out the carrot samples before weighing them and extracting DNA. 2. A bit more tricky; you’d probably have to get a single-cell suspension of carrot cells and look at them under a microscope to approximate their size… 3. I looked them up and the carrot genome is about 1.4 ×. 10^9 bp, the
