Abundant high-quality RNA from medicinal plants for molecular applications

Medicinal plants provide cure for several human and animal diseases. As a pre-requisite towards manipulating gene expression and engineering metabolites, efficient RNA isolation protocol from medicinal plants is needed. In the present study, four recent protocols of RNA isolation were compared based on the electrophoretic pattern as well as, the A260/A280 and A260/230 ratios of RNAs isolated from an important medicinal plant species namely,Rhazya stricta as well as, nine other medicinal plants grown in the Mecca region of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The protocols of modified SDS acid phenol and Institute of Himalayan Bio-resource Technology (IHBT) resulted in the most abundant high-quality RNAs. Synthesized cDNAs were checked by real time-qPCR and differential display-PCR (DD-PCR). The extracted RNAs of the IHBT protocol were proven to be more suitable for downstream molecular applications, especially metabolic engineering.   Key words: SDS acid phenol, Institute of Himalayan Bio-resource Technology (IHBT), real time-qPCR, DD-PCR, metabolic engineering.