Polysaccharid dissolving chemical

[MatFG]

Quick question here, does anybody know of a way to dissolve polysaccharides that does not affect DNA. It must leave DNA completely intact.

[CharonY]

Do you really mean dissolve? If so, water would be the most commonly used solvent.

[MatFG]

I have already tried water and the result, when the DNA was quantified, was miserable.

[John Cuthber]

There are lots of different polysaccharides and to dissolve some of them- like cellulose- you need to get rather aggressive. To be sure of dissolving all of them will be a problem in its own right/.

I doubt it's possible to do that without destroying DNA.

What are you trying to do?

Edited February 22, 2016 by John Cuthber

[MatFG]

Get rid of all kinds of polysaccharides present in the aerial part of a cactus plant. They are contaminating my sample and I was looking for a way to degrade them to something soluble in Trizol, chloroform and ethanol that I use to wash my samples.

[hypervalent_iodine]

Google scholar has plenty of papers with methods for doing this. You might just need to move away from Trizol and use another extraction method. For example.

[MatFG]

The obvious answer eluded me. Thanks man!

[John Cuthber]

It may be possible to remove unwanted stuff with enzymes.

[MatFG]

Yeah, I thought about that but wouldn't the enzymes also chow down on my DNA?

[John Cuthber]

Without doing the experiment, it's impossible to say.

However a lot of enzymes are remarkably specific in their actions.