Quick question here, does anybody know of a way to dissolve polysaccharides that does not affect DNA. It must leave DNA completely intact.

Do you really mean dissolve? If so, water would be the most commonly used solvent.

I have already tried water and the result, when the DNA was quantified, was miserable.

There are lots of different polysaccharides and to dissolve some of them- like cellulose- you need to get rather aggressive. To be sure of dissolving all of them will be a problem in its own right/.

I doubt it's possible to do that without destroying DNA.

What are you trying to do?

Edited February 22, 20169 yr by John Cuthber

Get rid of all kinds of polysaccharides present in the aerial part of a cactus plant. They are contaminating my sample and I was looking for a way to degrade them to something soluble in Trizol, chloroform and ethanol that I use to wash my samples.

Google scholar has plenty of papers with methods for doing this. You might just need to move away from Trizol and use another extraction method. For example.

The obvious answer eluded me. Thanks man!

It may be possible to remove unwanted stuff with enzymes.

Yeah, I thought about that but wouldn't the enzymes also chow down on my DNA?

Without doing the experiment, it's impossible to say.

However a lot of enzymes are remarkably specific in their actions.