Evaluation of two FTA card elutions with sterile vs distilled water

DNA extraction is frequently the starting point for all the experiments in biomedical and forensic research [1]. Nowadays, there are multiple commercial kits that allow carrying out the extraction rapidly, but often with a high financial cost. With the aim of presenting an alternative to these commercial kits, we have proposed two new DNA extraction methods using water. The extractions were carried out over FTA cards impregnated with blood, and using as extraction reagent two types of water. For the essays, it was compared the efficiency of using sterile water versus distilled water, with two objectives: 1) Finding out if the extraction was possible with both types of water and 2) Knowing what kind of water provided the best results. Our first results showed that distilled water was the best reagent for DNA extraction from blood, generating more positive results (mitochondrial DNA sequences with very good quality) than sterilized water. A possible reason is that distilled water has low ion concentration, allowing a stronger interaction with the DNA attached to the matrix of the FTA card and therefore a more effective extraction. It is our intent to perform in the future a similar extraction process, but with water both sterilized and distilled.