A rapid chemical method for lysing Arabidopsis cells for protein analysis

BACKGROUND: Protein extraction is a frequent procedure in biological research. For preparation of plant cell extracts, plant materials usually have to be ground and homogenized to physically break the robust cell wall, but this step is laborious and time-consuming when a large number of samples are handled at once. RESULTS: We developed a chemical method for lysing Arabidopsis cells without grinding. In this method, plants are boiled for just 10 minutes in a solution containing a Ca(2+ )chelator and detergent. Cell extracts prepared by this method were suitable for SDS-PAGE and immunoblot analysis. This method was also applicable to genomic DNA extraction for PCR analysis. Our method was applied to many other plant species, and worked well for some of them. CONCLUSIONS: Our method is rapid and economical, and allows many samples to be prepared simultaneously for protein analysis. Our method is useful not only for Arabidopsis research but also research on certain other species.