Sample Preparation Techniques for Soil, Plant, and Animal Samples

Book excerpt: The Sample Preparation Techniques for Environmental, Plant, and Animal Samples handbook is a collection of best practices, recipes and theoretical information aimed at anyone who works with any type of molecular biology, proteomics, or metabolomics research involving diffi cult and tough-to-process samples, and thus is exposed to the seemingly unbreakable bottleneck of sample preparation. Th is book is most useful to researchers preparing nucleic acids and proteins from environmental (e.g., soil, marine, and wastewater, feces) and tough microbiological (e.g., spores, yeasts, gram positive bacteria) samples, as well as solid tissue samples from plants and animals. This book is the first comprehensive piece of literature dealing with applications of bead beating technology and other types of mechanical homogenization sample preparation.