Sunday, February 22, 2015

Strawberry DNA lab

How to: Extrapolate DNA from Strawberries in Four Easy Steps!

These are all the materials that you are going to need to extrapolate DNA from strawberries!
1. Strawberries (Duh.. what else would you use? Bananas?)2. Ziplock baggie3. Coffee Filter4. Glass hook5. Dish washing Detegent6. Cylinder

STEP #1: SMUSH PARTY

So you're going to remove the leafs off the strawberry. Next, place the strawberry in the Ziplock baggie and close it for a tight seal. Most importantly, get to smushinnnn'.

  

STEP #2: FILTERATION MOTIVATION

After you have thoroughly smashed the strawberry, place the coffee filter in the cylinder creating a filtration center. Next, pour the strawberry and alcohol mixture through your set up.



STEP #3: IT'S RAINING, IT'S POURING

You will need a supervised adult or parental guardian for this step just to ensure safety, unless you are of age to do this simple experiment. This individual will pour alcohol into the baggie to act as an agent for uncoiling the DNA. We had our teacher, Mr. Phila-bird, obtain this liquid for us but we were fortunate enough to pour it in our test tubes ourselves!


After you complete this step, you should set the test tube in a secure place and watch what happens within the test tube!

STEP #4: EXTRAPOLATION

Once the alcohol sits with the smashed strawberry substance, you will see the strawberry DNA float up to the surface. Once you can see this happening, you can remove the DNA with the hook tool. We placed ours on a new coffee filter for an example for you guys. Additionally, we created a time-lapse of the time the alcohol was poured into the test tube to when we took the DNA out of the tube.