Abstract

Most methods for isolation of RNA from yeast require tedious vortexing with glass beads, and give low yields when scaled down to 10 ml cultures (1). In addition, it is frequently desirable to prepare RNA from several different yeast strains grown under a variety of growth conditions, and preparations using glass beads are impractical when dealing with multiple samples. Heating and freezing of yeast cells in the presence of phenol and SDS has been used for large scale isolation of RNA from yeast (2). We report here a mini-prep version of yeast RNA isolation using phenol and SDS that allows for the processing of a dozen samples in about 60 minutes, and provides enough RNA to run several northern blots. In our hands methods using glass beads are slower and give lower yields of RNA. RNA was isolated as follows. Ten ml cultures were grown in YPD (1 % yeast extract, 2 % peptone, 2 % dextrose) to an