economical miniprep kit - Which one? (Nov/28/2006 )

Could anyone recommends me an economical miniprep kit please?

Thanks in advantage!!

"Being economical" holds a real vague meaning in a multi national forum. Even though ours is not a very rich lab we do use Qiagen quickprep and it does not look too expensive.. its another matter that for routine screening and stuffs we use normal Sol 1,2 and 3 (alkaline lysis) method.

I agree that if you are just screening clonies, that you can just do a cheap alkaline lysis protocol. If you have downstream application, it pays in the long run to just get a miniprep kit from a company. The companies seem to have specials, so if you time your purchase right, you can usually get it at discount prices.

Yeah, you are right , I always do 1-2-3 and alcohol pp. (and it works fine ) it’s just that I’m doing a lot o things at the same times always!!!!!, so I have to do –sometimes- hundreds of minipreps (in addition of a lot of more things ). And, you know, using minipreps kit you save a lot of time!!

If I’m cloning an insert in a high copy number vector, I do toothpick minipreps to screen positive clones (easy and fast), but in many cases I can’t do that.

well even if the kit is cheap, it will be far away more expensive.

For batches of minipreps i use :
1-2-3
after the centrif, i put the supernatant in 1ml 100% etoh. invert and spin 5'
wash with etoh 80%
spin
dry and resuspend
so it's relative same time as a column.
if i want RNA free preparations i use RNAse in resuspension buffer (10mM tris pH 8)
or i use 1µl of RNase at 33mg/ml in my restriction digest mix

I do more or less the same to you (I use isopropanol) it’s more or less fast but definitively I spend more time than using a kit…

I hate to do a lot of minipreps always!!!

Hi Aztec,
Its your perception that miniprep columns will save your time. The columns which we have definitely take almost equal time with no major advantages except for the quality o DNA. As Fred_33 suggested try modulating miniprep protocol which is quite flexible where you can save a lot of time. ( I dry the pellet keeping the tubes on ~40C warmed heating block.... you have the dried pellet in 5 min!)

what do you want to used the miniprep DNA for?

if it is just screening for ligation, colony PCR would do fine. It'll save you a day (no culture growth period) . And you'll happily screen 400 colonies without hassle. (depending on the number of themocycling blocks you have).

I dry my miniprep (on the rare occasion that I do them) in a hybridisation incubator. I throw tubes, rack and all into said incubator(65 Celsius) and the circulating hot air dries everything in under 3mins.

A repeating pipette will also help you get through the minipreps faster.