I love strawberries, they’re delicious and sweet. A ripe, red strawberry is the perfect compliment to any waffle — the DNA, not so much.
Last week in Scimathics we completed a lab where the mission was to extract DNA from a strawberry to see what it looked like. To do this, we would use a strawberry, dish soap, water, ethanol and salt.
My lab partner was Robbie, and together we made this hypothesis: “If we combine soap, salt and ethonal then we expect to extract DNA from a strawberry.”
We learned about dependant and independent variables during this lab as well. The dependant variable of this experiment was the amount of DNA extracted, and the independent variable was the amount of each material we would use.
Proceeding on with the lab, we put the strawberry in a small plastic bag and added 5mL of dishsoap, 2.5mL of salt and 25mL of water. We crushed the contents of the bag, which was crucial to the experiment, because crushing the strawberry resulted in the cell wall being broken down. In order to get to the nucleus of the strawberry and find the DNA, the cell wall had to be crushed.
Next, we poured the contents into a test tube so it was filled halfway, and then we added 10mL of ethonal. For the next few minutes, we observed the contents. It was interesting to see how they separated and at the top of the liquid solution was a clump of white and pale pink stringy material. We inferred that this was the DNA.
Using a paper clip, Robbie and I lifted the DNA out of the test tube and brought it over to a microscope to observe it closely. The DNA looked like a snotty string in plain eyes view, but under a microscope you could see that it was an abundance of lines and spidery webs.
Our observations matched our hypothesis quite well, because by using salt, ethonal and dish soap we ended up extracting the DNA successfully. I think if we added more ethonal to the substance, we would’ve maximized the materials coming out of the strawberry.
Overall, I thought this lab was really interesting. Every time I eat a strawberry I’ll think about the gross white stringy cell DNA I’m eating! I learned how to successfully extract material from a cell and I also learned about dependent and independent variables.
Until next time