Isolation of nucleic acids.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an excellent model organism for the study of eukaryotic genetics. Easy manipulation of yeast DNA is essential to its role in research, and studies of gene expression or regulation require analysis of RNA. This chapter presents quick and straightforward methods to isolate genomic DNA, plasmid DNA, or RNA from yeast. The isolation protocols presented here, which utilize a glass bead method to break through the cell wall, will yield plasmid DNA of sufficient quality to transform into Escherichia coli, genomic DNA that can be digested with restriction enzymes for Southern blotting, or RNA for use in applications such as Northern blots.