Extract DNA In Your Kitchen

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Using only a Beer Glass and a few other household items and ingredients.

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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0 thoughts on “Extract DNA In Your Kitchen

  1. I gotta run to the drugstore and get some isopropyl alcohol. Otherwise I’ve got all the other ingredients.

    Now I know what the heat is for, to denature the proteins. Ahhhhh. Now once you’ve got the DNA separated out how do you separate the base pairs?

  2. Well, Tony, separating the helix can be done with heat as well, which is why he talks about being careful to not get it too hot. If you wanted to amplify this DNA sample you’d be using PCR. That involves heating a sample up, to the point of unzipping the helix, in the presence of a solution containing the 4 base pair elements and a thermally stable enzyme that will zip up the helix. You heat, separating the strands, then cool, allowing the enzyme to zip the free floating bases onto your two strands. Then you heat and cool again to come up with 4 strands. Repeat until you have the concentration you want.

    A lot of times you’re only interested in a small chunk of the genome, so you use more enzymes to trim a section of the strand out, then work at duplicating that.

    So, to do that at home, you’d need to order the appropriate enzyme(s), and a small supply of the 4 bases. I’d be surprised if those weren’t readily available. I’ve seen electrophoresis/PCR kits for kids at Fry’s Electronics.

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