Quantitation of DNA - and good, fast products that I don't know about? (May/20/2008 )

So, I'm looking at DNA quantitation for human DNA and right now I'm using PicoGreen, which is fast but inaccurate - because of the extraction type that is coupled to that system ssDNA is created which PicoGreen is bad at quantitating, also, there's probably a fair amount of RNA and protein (and possibly bacterial DNA) in each sample (a really grubby little extraction that cannot, for various reasons, be changed) that PicoGreen does detect confusing the signal to some degree.

We also have Quantifiler and Plexor HY, both human specific but RT-PCR based so although good and accurate they are stultifyingly slow and horribly expensive per sample.

I've heard of Nanodrop which seems fast and cheap and worth looking at but does anyone know of anything out there that would fit my purpose?

Watchwords are fast, cheap, accurate and as specific to human DNA as (reasonably) possible (but would rather veer away from PCR based technologies as they are slow and expensive for just quantitating the DNA).

Any ideas?

well i haven't personally used the nanodrop. and as for accurate results i can recommend the agilent bioanalyzer. if you know anyone who has this instrument, you can buy the DNA chip kit and you can look at quality of the DNA samples.

sorry if i wasn't too helpful...!

Nanodrop is excellent and relatively cheap, once you have the instrument and computer/software there is essentially no cost involved. I have found it to be very reliable and quick. Bioanalyser is expensive (US$1.5/sample), but very accurate, you also have to buy the reagents to load the chips for them, which is fairly expensive. I use a bioanalyser for RNA samples as it gives good info for down-stream applications.

No spec/analyser will be specific for human DNA or even mammalian DNA, as far as I know, all DNA is the same unless you get down to the particular sequence.