automating RNA isolation - Has anyone done automation of yeast RNA isolation at any stage??? (Oct/21/2009 )

Hi all,

I am going to have a real lot of yeast RNA isolations to be done in the near future. I feel it would make sense to automate the process somehow. Does anyone have a clue of how to do this or know about any of your friends/colleagues who did something similar?? I haven't come across any automated protocols yet as the yeast requires lysis of the cell wall before RNA isolation and most of the methods use phenol based methods which again would be a bottleneck for automation.

any suggestion would be greatly appreciated..thanks

I haven't done yeast RNA isolation but I automated our mammalian cell genomic DNA isolation (which also isolates RNA).
We used SPRI and that worked fairly well. I think I also read a paper where SPRI was used to isolate yeast DNA and RNA (since SPRI doesn't seem to distinguish between the two).

hi warsel,

SPRI would work with the mammalian cells easily, but as I said earlier, yeast cells need to be mechanically or enzymatically lysed before we could start the isolation process...so this is the bottleneck in my case