(1) Adele Mennerat, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Bergen, authored a paper on molecular microbiology titled “How to Deal with PCR Contamination in Molecular Microbial Ecology” (2014) that asserted pre-treating PCR reagents with restriction enzymes yielded more accurate amplified DNA. (2) Dr. Mennerat illustrated that samples treated with the restriction enzyme SAU3AI had a reduction in the measured bacterial richness after amplification when compared to untreated samples, but not to a great enough extent that it may have been interferring with the amplification of the sample of interest. (3) The purpose of this paper was to offer a potential solution to deal with bacterial DNA contamination of PCR reagents that can occur even with careful laboratory practices, to yield more accurate measurements of sample richness. (4) Dr. Mennerat established a credible relationship with the readers by not over-concluding or over-selling what her results indicated, likely because this is paper is geared towards critically-minded molecular microbiologists who are attempting to refine their results to more closely match the true sample richness.
References
Mennerat A, Sheldon BC. 2014. How to Deal with PCR Contamination in Molecular Microbial Ecology. Microb. Ecol. 68:834–841. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-014-0453-y.
