A fundamental difficulty in purifying nucleic acids is that sample degradation can take place at various stages of intricate protocols. In applications such as mRNA extraction, separation of DNA from solutions or gels, or isolation of plasmid DNA there is a need for methods that are both less intricate, and allow more gentle sample handling.

The popularity of magnetic separations stems from the fact that they omit the use of the intricate steps needed in conventional chromatography and/or organic solvent separation methods. However, automated systems based on magnetic bioseparation may still be robust in their treatment of samples, and inflexible for researchers not dealing with very large numbers of samples. Manual magnetic bioseparation methods allow gentle sample treatment but are still time-consuming. The time required to perform isolations increases in direct proportion to the number of samples since parallel processing can be cumbersome in manual systems.

PickPen represents a new and better magnetic bioseparation solution because while it allows gentle handling, it is also fast, and provides the needed flexibility and convenience in smaller scale work. It requires no investment in laboratory instrumentation and takes up no benchtop space. It is suitable for a wide range of applications, including the purification of gDNA, plant DNA or plasmid DNA, as well as the isolation of mRNA from a wide range of starting materials. The time required to isolate high-quality mRNA is less than 10 minutes. Moreover, since parallel processing is possible, the extraction time remains essentially the same whether one or several samples are being handled. To support higher throughput processing Bio-Nobile will shortly introduce an 8-channel version of PickPen.