The innate soluble polysaccharides and phenolic compounds of marine macroalgae are serious contaminants which interfere with experimental procedures such as restriction enzyme digestion, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and other enzymatic reactions using extracted DNA samples. The viscous polysaccharides are co-precipitated with DNA samples by isopropanol or ethanol precipitation in conventional experiment. To overcome the problem, a method for the isolation of high molecular weight DNA from Porphyra tenera is developed with the application of diatomaceous earth column. The isolated DNAs by this method were about 50-100 kb in size and could be digested well with restriction enzymes. The nuclease activity seemed to be minimal, and high reproducibility in the arbitrary primed PCR for RAPD analyses was a distinctive feature. These results suggest that this method is very efficient in isolating nucleic acid from macroalgae including Porphyra.