My granddaughter was fortunate enough to attend a special event at a local university over the weekend for middle school students.
One of their experiments was extracting DNA from mixed fruits.
Needless to say I’m extremely proud of this “chip off the old helix.”
You can do this experiment too, easily with just items you have at home in your kitchen. This wonderful video not only shows you how to do the experiment, the host explains what is happening. Sooooo interesting – and easy.
Did you know that you can extract DNA from strawberries, bananas or kiwi fruit and can even extract your own DNA by swishing water in your mouth and using the same extraction process? Maybe you could do all three and compare the results!
Here are some additional references, questions, discussion items and tips for teachers:
http://www.apsnet.org/EDCENTER/K-12/TEACHERSGUIDE/PLANTBIOTECHNOLOGY/Pages/Activity1.aspx
http://www.livescience.com/37252-dna-science-experiment.html
http://www.funsci.com/fun3_en/dna/dnaen.htm
http://www.imb.uq.edu.au/strawberry-dna-extraction-experiment
Have fun!!!
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Angie Bush had us do this using strawberries in the DNA classes at SLIG. Fun stuff!
BTW – Love the t-shirt!
Roberta, I love your granddaughter’s shirt!!! Quite applicable to Pi Day on the 14th, too — 3.14 (2016).
~ Burton Reynolds (329104)
Wow! I watched the video and it sounds so easy. I wouldn’t have though you could actually see DNA coming out of the cells. I need to try it at home.
I love the T-shirt, too. The only question is whether she ate “some” pie (as a homonym of sum) or all of it (as the sum of the pie).