Table Of ContentHandbooks
Miodrag Mićić Editor
Sample Preparation
Techniques for
Soil, Plant, and
Animal Samples
Springer Protocols Handbooks
More information about this series at h ttp://www.springer.com/series/8623
ć ć
Miodrag Mi i
Editor
Sample Preparation
Techniques for Soil, Plant,
and Animal Samples
Editor
Miodrag Mićić
Department of Engineering Design Technology
Cerritos College
Norwalk , CA , USA
Department of New Products Development
Cerritos College
Norwalk , CA , USA
ISSN 1949-2448 ISSN 1949-2456 (electronic)
Springer Protocols Handbooks
ISBN 978-1-4939-3184-2 ISBN 978-1-4939-3185-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-3185-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955841
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
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This book is dedicated to the loving memory
of my late mother, Ms. Nadežda Mićić for her
unlimited love, care and support, and to the
memory of my late mentors: Professor Vilim
J. Vajgand, who was my fi rst chemistry
professor and who, when I was a ten-year-
old kid, allowed me to attend his university
lectures at the Faculty of Natural Sciences
and Mathematics of the University of
Belgrade; Professor Predrag Polić, who was
the co-advisor for my doctoral dissertation
at the University of Belgrade; and Mr. Fred
Andrea, former COO of ICN Biomedicals
Inc. and MP Biomedicals LLC, who
introduced me to the business side of product
development for the biotech and life science
industries.
Foreword
I n a Foreword the role of a writer is to introduce content and subject matter of the
book and author to the public. In the case of my young colleague, Prof. Miodrag
“Mickey” Mićić, Sc.D., Ph.D., M.T.M., CSWP, and his sample preparation book, it
is a new book, so it is a pleasure and honor for me to do both. I have had a long and
close working relationship with Dr. Mićić since he was a Vice President of Research
and Development at MP Biomedicals LLC in Santa Ana, California, where he suc-
cessfully developed a line of sample preparation systems used for wide arrays of
applications in various fi elds of life science, the most successful and popular of
which being the FastPrep® - 24 system, which becomes the workhorse of the labs
dealing with diffi cult-to-lyse materials ranging from tissues samples from neural
science research to the environmental samples.
Prof. Mićić is, to say the least, an interesting and personable individual. The fi rst
time I heard of him was actually sometime back in 1984 or 1985, when Dr. Mićić
was a young kid, maybe about 10 years old, as he showed up one day to the
University of Belgrade (at that time Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics)
to see my colleague Prof. Vilim Vajgand, and he asked to attend some lectures. He
kind of become the youngest “student” there, and at that time he was featured by
several major news publications in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. I believe I fi rst met him in person around the same time, when he arrived
one day to attend a lecture from some of our foreign guests at the Serbian Academy
of Sciences. His passion for science and engineering continue up to this day. Fast
forwarding some 20 or so years, I met Prof. Mićić again when he was hired to be a
Vice President of Research and Development at MP Biomedicals (Formerly part of
ICN Corporation), back in 2004, where I was the Chairman of the Scientifi c
Advisory Board of the Company. Dr. Mićić interests have spread across various
disciplines bridging natural sciences and engineering; this is what puts him in a
unique position to be a great instrumentation developer. I have rarely encountered a
person with such a diversity of knowledge and skills, both for natural sciences dis-
covery and for engineering product development. He has persuaded the MP
Biomedicals management to pursue a different direction, transforming it from a
pure reagents house to an integrated systems manufacturer, and today the FastPrep
vii
viii Foreword
system and other systems Dr. Mićić developed there are the fl agships of MP
Biomedicals. As a book usually is a refl ection of the persona of the author or editor,
his book, accordingly, is very diverse, lucid, interesting, very succinct, and to the
point. To the best of my knowledge, until this book, there was no single all-inclusive
resource to learn of theoretical and practical aspects of sample preparations for
molecular biology, proteomics, and glycomics-related studies, especially for diffi -
cult samples. As this is such a diverse and multidisciplinary fi eld involving anyone
touching the life sciences area in any form, it is in my honest belief that there is no
other single author who can cover it in its entirety. As such, Prof. Mićić has brought
together a very unique crowd of authors. Those authors are handpicked from the
combination of the best specialists in the fi eld and young rising stars, to wr ite this
piece . This book for the fi rst time systematizes most of the tribal knowledge of the
fi eld and sheds a further light on this process fl ow which is, for many researchers,
the most occasional reason for a bottleneck in a lab.
The book is virtually a must for anyone who comes into grasp with the molecular
biology of any type of organism, as virtually whatever you try to study, you start by
extracting its nucleic acids—and most often end up with a technical problem of how
to resolve some mundane diffi culties in processing the particular sample, fi nding it
that it may be both frustrating and time-consuming, and a work-stop situation. This
can happen to anyone in the lab, regardless of the fi eld of work or level of experi-
ence. I strongly believe that this book, with a variety of methods, protocols, and
background information, can signifi cantly aid anyone in breaking such bottleneck
and save time, money, and frustration.
I—myself being the M.D.-Ph.D., a physician-turned-neural-scientist, who
mainly practices translational research—fi nd this subject enlightening and helpful
for my activities. Thereby, besides the traditional crowd of life scientists for whom
this book is intended, the book will be highly benefi cial to physicians practicing the
art of translational medicines as well as to any practicing pathologist, forensics/
legal medicine, molecular pathologists, and clinical diagnostics expert.
To complete my short foreword statement, Prof. Mićić and the authors of this
book have succeeded in organizing, summarizing, and presenting the scattered
world of sample preparation information with direct practical recipes that everyone
can understand and fi nd useful. While it is directed to us, who practice the art and
science of molecular biology in our research or everyday practice, the book will also
be of great value to trainees in all other fi elds, where high purity and integrity of
biological macromolecules, be they what they may, need to be isolated from a sam-
ple applying the same principles described in this book. Based on all of the above, I
am excited to add this book to my bookshelf, confi dent that it will not stay long on
the bookshelf, as I am sure that we will be using it regularly to shed further light on
some of the problems that my colleagues and I are experiencing in our everyday
practice of our neural sciences and translational medicine research.
Academician Ljubiša Rakić, M.D., Ph.D.
Vice President of the Serbian Academy of Sciences
and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia
Pref ace
Sample Preparation Techniques for Soil, Plant and Animal Samples arrives to fi ll
the unusual gap in the modern molecular biology lab practice collection of books.
The editor of this book was surprised that, while the sample preparation for a variety
of molecular biology analyses, especially from the diffi cult-to-process matrices,
represents a major bottleneck in a modern molecular biology lab practices, there is
no single comprehensive resource currently on the market covering its theory and
practice. It is estimated that about 20% of the time spent by researchers in the
molecular biology lab is actually spent on nonproductive tasks of nucleic acid sam-
ple preparation, so the editor felt compelled to assemble a comprehensive treatise
on the theory and practice of sample preparation of diffi cult samples, to help
researchers to break the lab productivity bottleneck. For readers’ clarifi cation, I
qualify as diffi cult any samples of complex mechanical matrices, which are diffi cult
to grind, homogenize, and lyse, or which are “dirty,” i.e., contain other components
or contaminants which may interfere with further nucleic acids purifi cation or
processing.
This book will cover both the theoretical foundations and practical recipes for
successful sample preparation processes and tasks dealing with diffi cult samples,
such as samples of plant and animal origin, and complex matrices such as food and
feed, environmental samples, soils, water, and fecal matter. As such, this book
appeals to a broad spectrum of practitioners doing research, diagnostics, or quality
control work in broad areas, such as agro-biotech, food technology, plant science,
plant breeding, environmental science, marine biology, soil microbiology, nutri-
tional science, and animal breeding, up to and including law and customs enforce-
ment agencies, forensics, industrial and agricultural hygiene, and many others. The
book is equally appealing to anyone working at the bench, including students, graduate
students, postdocs, industrial researchers, lab technicians, fi eld scientists, diagnos-
tics technicians, and other similar professionals or aspiring future professionals in
the life science arena, as well as the professionals working for the life science com-
panies who are developing, promoting, and doing customer service supports for the
instruments, tools, and kits for DNA and RNA extraction.
ix
