Commercial RNA isolation kits were not designed for use with plant tissues containing high concentrations of polyphenols, polysaccharides and other secondary metabolites. There are reports modifying extraction buffers in the plant RNeasy® mini kit and leading to successful RNA extraction on leaves and bud tissue of grapevine and from leaves, bud and cane tissues of woody plant [15,16], but this has rarely been tested on seeds. Applying the published protocols developed for RNA isolation from cereal seeds [3,7] and sunflower dry seeds [6] generated poor quality and low yield RNA from Jerusalem artichoke dry seeds. We also observed that the pellet became viscous when phenol and chloroform were added. The method of Wang et al. [7] was able to extract 9 and 13 μg RNA/30 mg fresh weight from Jerusalem artichoke cv. JA37 and HEL53, respectively. A260/A280 were 1.82 and 1.77 while A260/A230 ratios of total RNA were 1.56 and 1.55 (Table 1), suggesting their impurity.