Point-sink DNA Shearing Device

Stanford researchers have developed a new method and apparatus for shearing polynucleotides. The device can shear both double (ds)- and single-stranded (ss) polynucleotides and produces a defined size distribution of fragments, with a selected mean size ranging between 200 and 20,000 for ds polynucleotides and half those values for ss polynucleotides. This technology improves upon most current methods for random DNA fragmentation by creating randomly cleaved and efficiently clonable fragments that reproducibly are small in size and fall within a narrow range in size.