Isolation of Genomic DNA from Mouse Tails

So this is a 10 day old mouse pup and I'm going to be taking a tail biopsy and then I'm going to extract genomic DNA from its tail. So what I'm gonna do is snip a little bit of its tail off, roughly about three millimeters, and then I'll place the piece of tail in an einor tube and I'll place the einor tube on dry ice. Now, to avoid contamination from one mouse to another, I usually mark the razor blade at the part in which I made the last cut.

That way for the next mouse, I'll be sure to use a clean piece of razor blade for taking the next tail biopsy. In order to distinguish between the different mice in your litter, you're gonna need a way to identify the mice. One way to do that is by punching a hole in their ears using an ear hole puncher that's shown here.

Gently take the mouse by the scruff of its neck like so turn it over and pinch its tail between your fingers. Take the ear hole puncture in the other hand and make a quick snip in the mouse's ear there. See how painless that was?

Okay, so now you can see I've got some pieces of tail in these einor tubes and now I'm gonna add the solutions that will help them to digest. First I'm going to add 720 microliters of STE solution, and then I'm going to add 30 microliters of protein. Ace K.So here's a look at the piece of tail that we've cut prior to digestion.

Now I'm gonna place the tail pieces on a 55 degree heating block. Many protocols call for continuous motion rocking at 55 degrees, but for my purposes this won't be necessary because I'll be vortexing the tail pieces. Now I'm gonna vortex the piece of tail for two seconds.

One, two. So after vortexing, here's a look at what's left inside the einor tube here, and you could see that the piece of tail has been completely dissolved and activate the proteinase K at 70 degrees Celsius for five minutes. Quench on ice for five minutes.

Spin down tail pieces in a micro centrifuge for 10 minutes at full speed. In this micro centrifuge, full speed is 13, 000 RPMs. While the digestive tails are spinning down, label some einor tubes fill the einor tubes with 750 microliters of isopropanol.

After spinning down the digested tails, the hair and undigested material will form a pellet at the bottom of the tube decant. The solution containing the digested material, STE and proteinase K into the einor tube containing the isopropanol DNA will begin to come out of solution, will appear ghostlike and feather like, and right there swimming around that bubble is genomic DNA that's been isolated from the mouse's tail. After mixing the isopropanol and STE solution, the genomic DNA will come out of solution and it is appear as this little ball right here, spin down the precipitated genomic DNA for five minutes at full speed in a micro centrifuge.

There at the bottom of the tube is a look at our pelleted genomic DNA. Now I'm going to aspirate out the solution inside the tube, leaving only the pellet of genomic DNA behind. Each time I aspirate another tube, I'll change the pipe.

Pet tip on the tip of this aspirator. After aspirating away the STE and isopropanol, I'll add one milliliter of 70%ethanol to wash the genomic DNA pellet. Because the pellet of genomic DNA usually adheres to the side of a micro fuge tube and is difficult to get off to thoroughly wash it in the 70%ethanol, you'll need to rake it across the micro fuge tube rack I have here.

You can do that like so. So here's a look at the genomic DNA after it's been pelleted and washed in 70%ethanol. I'm gonna spin this down again at full speed for five minutes and then aspirate away the 70%ethanol spin down the genomic DNA pellets after they've been washed.

Their 70%ethanol five minutes at full speed, going to aspirate the 70%ethanol and let the DNA dry for five minutes. There's a look at the genomic DNA pellet at the bottom of the tube, and that's about as dry as you want to get it. So I've dried out the pellets of genomic DNA from the mouse tails, and now I'm gonna add a hundred microliters of 40 millimolar triss at pH eight.

So I've got the genomic DNA at 50 degrees Celsius, where it will go into solution more rapidly than add room temperature. After about an hour or so at 50 degrees, I'll either freeze it or put it at four degrees until I want to run my PCR reactions to actually figure out which mice are positive for my transgene.