## 1 Introduction  
Reliable and accurate molecular diagnostics are crucial for the detection of pathogenic bacteria in clinical, food, and environmental samples [1; 2; 3]. There are various methods and commercial kits available for the rapid extraction of bacterial DNA from environmental samples for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [4; 5; 6; 7]. These methods achieve lysis by heat treatment, detergent, enzymes, pulverization, pH, chaotropic chemicals, or a combination of these, which is then followed by either chaotrope-based fractionation, phenol extraction, or size exclusion column purification [8; 9; 10; 11; 12]. Purification of the extracted DNA can involve precipitation or column-based nucleic acid capture. Traditionally, DNA extraction from cultured bacteria often includes expensive and complicated enzyme combinations or costly hazardous chemicals such as phenol or chloroform [13; 14; 15; 12]. These methods vary in effectiveness depending on the application and the matrix from which the cells are obtained [16]. Although current techniques are well proven to produce high-quality nucleic acids (DNA or RNA), they are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive to implement. In addition, the quantity of genomic DNA that they produce could be insufficient. These limitations become much more significant in settings with limited resources. As a result, the implementation of molecular testing is considerably hampered in many regions of the globe, especially in developing countries [12]. Therefore, the development of rapid, easy-to-use,and more efficient DNA extraction techniques that do not rely on complex laboratory equipment facilitates the advancement of molecular clinical detection technologies. Recent years have seen the development of novel approaches for extracting DNA from plants [17], mouse tails [18], microbes from sediments [19; 20], protozoa [21], and fungal/oomycte samples [22] using NaOH alone or in combination with other chemicals. Therefore, it has been proven that NaOH is capable of effectively lysing a variety of cell types from diverse biological materials within 10 min. The extraction is most effective using NaOH, which also inactivates nucleases during the extraction process. In most of these treatments, NaOH was administered along with reagents including sodium dodecyl sulfate or sodium acetate [17; 23] or at elevated temperatures to disrupt cell walls, especially for Gram-positive bacteria [20; 24]. Hence, these treatments complicate the protocol with additional PCR inhibitors or other time-consuming steps. Consequently, a fast DNA extraction procedure that consistently produces high DNA yields and can be applied to both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria without the use of additional chemicals or enzymatic treatments would be beneficial in terms of saving time and money while allowing for increased DNA yields. The goal of this research was to develop an inexpensive technique for rapid lysis of bacteria that can be carried out with minimal laboratory equipment and used for subsequent DNA-based diagnostics. Our impetus was monitoring for specific bacteria in the environment during our lameness trials. In these trials, we showed that bacterial chondorecosis with osteomyelitislicitis (BCO) lameness can spread through the air from one pen to others [25; 26]. We previously used open agar plates for culture-based sampling of air during lameness trials [25]. However, culture-based sampling is less efficient than qPCR analysis with genus- or species-specific primers. We found that we could use a standard glass impinger to sample air for viable bacterial plate counts in our lameness trial facilities. However, extracting DNAs from these same samples was more problematic, especially for some species of concern in our experiments. We found that simple alkaline extraction can be effective for liberation of DNA from many Gram-positive and -negative bacteria.