Welcome back to the grade 9 scimatics classroom, it’s been a while. For the past few weeks we have been learning about cells and organelles, for example, where the organelles are located, what their functions and roles are in the cell and all about cell reproduction and division.

To go along with this unit in science we did a lab all about D.N.A., specifically a strawberry’s D.N.A. Our goal for the lab was to pull out the D.N.A. of a strawberry using only dish soap, salt, water, ethanol, a plastic bag, a test tube, a paper clip, and of course, a strawberry.

First, we started by gathering the materials, then we proceed by putting half a strawberry into a plastic bag along with dish soap, salt, and water. Then we crushed the strawberry to crack the cell wall, this allows the contents of the bag and the ethanol to enter the strawberry’s membrane. After letting the contents of the bag enter the strawberry for a few minutes we poured the bag into a test tube filled with the ethanol. The ethanol causes strands of DNA to float to the top of the test tube. From there we took the strands of DNA and put them under a microscope.

This is what it looked like:

This lab was very interesting because I have never seen DNA in person before.
After the lab, we learned more about DNA, what it’s made of, its structure, etc. We also had to build a DNA model that represented a double helix form, and it needed to show the 4 different basic pairs. Reid and I made ours out of beads to represent the base and pipe cleaners. This is what it looked like.

Overall, both projects were fun and interesting to do, and I learned a lot about DNA.