Let’s face it. There are a lot of different ways to skin a microbe, and get the DNA and RNA out for whatever purposes you might deem necessary or useful. If you ask one or two people you’ll get one or two answers. What if you ask more than a thousand? Here is some insightful crowd-sourced feedback from Twitter on favorite and least-favorite methods of nucleic acid extraction, and we’ve done our best to include references with real comparative data, protocols, and applications:

-jct