Rapid methods for nucleic acids extraction from petri dish-grown mycelia

We have developed rapid and economic methods for the isolation of nucleic acids from filamentous fungi. The main advantages of these methods are: (1) the mycelium is directly recovered from a Petri-dish culture, (2) the complete experiment takes place in microfuge tubes, (3) it is very fast and allows for the processing of 24 samples in the same day, and (4) up to 100 mu g of total DNA or RNA are recovered, both of which are sufficiently pure for most purposes. Of particular interest is the recovery of large amounts of mitochondrial DNA as visualised by electrophoresis in ethidium bromide-stained gels.