Simple, fast and inexpensive hot sodium hydroxide and tris DNA extraction method for genotyping tomato and melon seeds

Seed commerce is a highly profitable global market. Most commercialized seeds are hybrid seeds originating from a controlled cross between two selected parental lines. The market value of hybrid seeds depends on their hybrid genetic purity. DNA molecular markers are a reliable and widespread tool to genotype plant materials; however, DNA extraction from seeds is challenging, often laborious and expensive. With the ultimate goal of creating a tomato and melon hybrid seeds purity test, various challenges arise. To overcome these problems and with the purpose of crude DNA extraction, a simple, fast, inexpensive and easily scalable adaptation of the hot sodium hydroxide and tris method coupled to a competitive allele-specific PCR genotyping method is proposed.

Automated summary

Seed commerce is a profitable global market, and the value of hybrid seeds depends on their genetic purity. However, extracting DNA from seeds is challenging. To overcome this, a simple, fast, inexpensive, and scalable method for DNA extraction is proposed for testing the purity of hybrid seeds in tomatoes and melons.