Sambrook, Fritsch and Maniatis 1989: the second edition of the Molecular Cloning manual
The second edition of Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual came out in three volumes from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1989. A 2020 genetics paper cites it as the basis of its phenol-chloroform DNA extraction.
What the study did and found
The work is a methods book rather than a study. “Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual”, second edition, by Joe Sambrook, Ed Fritsch and Tom Maniatis, was published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1989 (Sambrook et al., 1989).
The manual grew from protocols used on a 1980 gene-cloning course at Cold Spring Harbor. The 1982 first edition went through sixteen printings before this expanded three-volume second edition; it collects step-by-step recipes for work with nucleic acids and reports no findings of its own (Creager, 2020).
Why it is cited
The most prominent referring page is a 2020 BMC Medical Genetics paper on INDEL variants in apoptosis genes and gastric cancer. Its methods credit this manual for phenol-chloroform DNA extraction and cite it by its Cabdirect address.
That use matches the work: the paper borrows a standard procedure and credits no results to the book. A 2024 Wasit Journal for Pure Sciences paper links to the same address for keeping streptococcal cultures in glycerol broth.
As a methods book, the manual records accepted practice in 1989 rather than evidence for a result. Its protocols predate the rapid silica and guanidinium purification method of 1990 (Boom et al., 1990), and two later editions, in 2001 and 2012, replaced it (Creager, 2020).
Citation counts show how central it became. Nature’s 2014 analysis of Google Scholar data ranked Molecular Cloning fourth among the most-cited works, with 172,540 citations to the 1989 edition alone (Van Noorden et al., 2014).
The topic today
The fourth edition, by Michael Green and Joseph Sambrook, appeared in 2012 with 12 new chapters, including RNA interference, genome sequencing and bioinformatics (Green & Sambrook, 2012). Newer methods such as Gibson assembly join overlapping DNA pieces in one reaction (Gibson et al., 2009).
For the current picture, see our explainer The 1989 Molecular Cloning Manual: Why Labs Still Cite It.