The contemporary genomic laboratory faces many challenges associated with nucleic acid isolation and purification. In part these are related to the hazardous reagents that have become the standard in the industry. The standardized methods using (magnetic bead-based) DNA isolation currently rely heavily on flammable and hazardous substances such as isopropanol, ethanol and chaotropic salts.
While these standardized methods have proven themselves, they come with a variety of problems and risks for laboratories during day-to-day operations. The high volumes of alcohol-based buffers create dangerous health, safety and environmental risks by exposing employees to explosion risks and hazardous chemicals. Besides this health risk it also faces logistic challenges. Shipping dangerous goods is very costly, whilst local storage and disposal of these reagents prove to be difficult and expensive. Moreover, disposal of these chemicals in an ecological friendly manner is very problematic, due to the composition of the reagents.
The safety risks of the dangerous chemicals also call for concern both within the industry and in legislative government. Within the European Union ATEX legislation (2014/34/EU) requires companies utilizing explosive chemicals to handle them safely and look into safer alternatives if available.
Currently, certain types of waste and risks are easily written off as inevitable in the fast-moving work of genomic laboratories. However, as our world progresses toward sustainability, it is important for the laboratory industry to innovate as much as possible to reach ambitious Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) goals.
Removal of alcohols and chaotropic substances from (high-throughput) genomic workflows is now more viable than ever. The Dutch based company MolGen aims to push the industry toward safety and sustainability with the PurePrep 0.0 kit, which contains absolutely zero alcoholic components, or chaotropic salts. This bead-based DNA purification kit has been developed and tested extensively on seed and leaf material of all large production crops. This safer and automation friendly alternative for DNA extraction can be implemented everywhere from small manual production laboratories, up to fully automated hands-off high-throughput genomic workflows without loss of yield and purity.
In addition to the benefits of being alcohol and chaotropic salt free, the PurePrep 0.0 kit results in faster extraction times for both plant and veterinary samples while reducing hazardous and plastic waste. MolGen will be at CropIB 2025 to present this product and help companies automate and innovate to the next era of genomic lab automation.