Successful extraction of DNA is an essential and time consuming step in many plant molecular biology procedures. The classical approaches of plant DNA isolation are often designed to produce large amounts of DNA of high molecular weight with sufficient purity. Since the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) 1s the method of choice in modern plant genetic analyses such as map-based breeding and positional gene clonmg, many recently developed protocols are aimed at rapid extraction of a minute quantity of plant DNA that 1s sultable for PCR. This allows large numbers of samples to be analyzed m a short period of time.