Abstract: Disclosed herein are methods and compositions for normalizing polynucleotide concentration. Normalizing may be accomplished using polynucleotide binding proteins (e.g., catalytically inactive CRISPR protein or catalytically inactive Argonaute proteins). The polynucleotide binding proteins may bind to the adapter sequences of a target polynucleotide. Thus, adding the same amount of a polynucleotide binding proteins to different samples and then extracting the polynucleotide protein is shown herein to extract similar amounts of target polynucleotides from the different samples.