Isolation of high quality RNA from Polyporus umbellatus (Pers.) Fries

background: the dried sclerotium of medicinal fungus polyporus umbellatus (pers.) fries has many pharmacological functions such as diuretic and anticancer activity, in which high-content polysaccharides may play an important role. however, rna isolation is difficult in filamentous fungi and lacking in p. umbellatus. results: five methods for rna extraction from five strains collected from four provinces were assessed for their ability to recover a high-quality rna applicable for sequence-related amplification polymorphism (srap) pcr and gdp-d-mannose pyrophosphorylase (gmp) gene expression profiles. both a260/a280 and a260/a230 ratios of the best trizol plus + rnaiso-mate for plant tissue method are around 2 with a yield of 1122.00 ± 0.21 ng μl-1. the trizol method also showed good quality with the yield 469.60 ng μl-1. the srap pcr amplified clear and polymorphic bands in all five cdna samples transcribed from rna by using primer me4-em4. gmp gene fragment (1251 bp) was successfully amplified by rt-pcr, suggesting the integrity of isolated rna. conclusion: all these results showed that the total rna isolated by this protocol is of sufficient quality for subsequent molecular applications.