• A mouse tail tip.

• A single well of cells in a 96-well plate.

• A fingerprint.

• A pulverised leaf.

• A 500-year-old archaeological swab.

Five sample types, five very different contexts, and one shared thread: each has been extracted using enzymatic chemistry rather than a column, a bead, or an overnight digestion.

None of these require a fully equipped molecular biology lab to begin with. They require:

• a tube

• a thermocycler,

• and a few minutes…

What happens after extraction, sequencing, PCR, genotyping, still depends on proper equipment and expertise. But the bottleneck that used to sit between sample and usable DNA has, in each of these cases, mostly disappeared.