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Overview
Welcome to 'Bring Science Home'
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Overview
It's a Solid... It's a Liquid... It's Oobleck!
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Overview
The Magic of Gravity
[Activity 2] -
Overview
Bend Water with Static Electricity
[Activity 3] -
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Under Pressure: Launch a Balloon Rocket
[Activity 4] -
Overview
Talk through a String Telephone
[Activity 5] -
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Yeast Alive! Watch Yeast Live and Breathe
[Activity 6] -
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Sink or Swim: Muscle versus Fat
[Activity 7]
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What a Plant Knows
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Key concepts
Cells
DNA
Genes
From National Science Education Standards: Reproduction and heredity
Introduction
What do you have in common with a banana? Even though we might not look alike, all living things—bananas and people included—are made up of the same basic material.
Just like houses are made up of smaller units such as bricks, all living things are made up trillions of microscopic building blocks called cells. Within an organism, each cell contains a complete set of "blueprints". These directions determine the organism's characteristics.
Background
If we could zoom in on a single, tiny cell, we could see an even teenier "container" inside called a nucleus. It holds a stringy substance called DNA, which is like a set of blueprints, or instructions. DNA contains a code for how to build a life-form and put together the features that make that organism unique. Segments, or pieces, of DNA are called "genes". In living things, such as us, each gene determines something about our bodies—a trait. In our DNA there are genes that are responsible for hair color, eye color, earlobe shape and so on. We get our DNA from our parents. Some characteristics, like eye color, are pretty much entirely determined by DNA. Some are determined both by DNA and by your environment as you grow up, like how tall you will be as an adult. And some traits are not very directly tied to DNA at all, like the kind of books you like to read.
Just like us, banana plants have genes and DNA in their cells, and just like us, their DNA determines their traits. Using only our eyes, we couldn't see a single cell or the DNA inside of it. If we remove DNA from millions of cells, however, we will be able to view it without a microscope. That is what we will do today!
Materials
• Ripe banana
• Half cup of water
• Teaspoon of salt
• Resealable zip-top bag
• Dishwashing soap or detergent
• Rubbing alcohol
• Coffee filter
• Narrow glass
• Narrow wooden stirrer
Preparation
• Place your bottle of rubbing alcohol into the refrigerator or freezer and let it chill for the duration of this experiment.
• Peel a banana.
• Put the peeled banana in a resealable zip-top bag and close the bag.
• On a hard surface like a tabletop or kitchen counter, mush the banana in the bag for about a minute until it has a fine, puddinglike consistency and until all lumps are gone. Do not slap the bag or mash the banana too close to the bag's zip seal. (This could cause the seal to open and the banana to squirt out and make a mess.)
Procedure
• Fill a measuring cup with a half cup of hot water and a teaspoon of salt.
• Pour this saltwater into the bag, and close the bag. Gently mix and slosh the saltwater and mashed banana together for 30 to 45 seconds.
• Add a half of a teaspoon of dishwashing detergent or dish soap into the bag. Again, mix around the contents gently. You do not want the mixture to become too foamy.
• Place the bottom half of a coffee filter in a clear glass cup. The top part of the filter should be folded over the rim of the glass to keep it in place.
• Carefully pour the contents of the bag into the filter and let it sit for several minutes until all of the liquid has dripped down into the cup. (You can now throw out the coffee filter and its contents.)
• Take the rubbing alcohol from the refrigerator. Tilt the glass and slowly pour the alcohol down the side of the cup until there is a layer that is 2.5 to five centimeters (one to two inches) thick. You want to keep the alcohol and the liquefied banana as separate as possible, so complete this step slowly.
• Let this two-layered mixture sit for eight minutes. During this time, what do you see happening between the alcohol and the banana liquid layer? It looks cloudy and may have some tiny bubbles in it. The longer you wait, the more defined this layer becomes. This is the DNA pieces clumping together.
• Stick the wooden stirrer into the cup. Spin it in place so that cloudy layer spools around it. Remove the stirrer. Can you capture some of the stringy middle layer on your stirrer and remove it from the cup? The substance that you see on the stirrer is DNA!
Read on for observations, results and more resources.
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13 Comments
Add CommentThis is very simple but of great importance experiment you have given. Also materials required are so common.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe this is a best experiments for students to see DNA.
The analogy of DNA being a blueprint for a living organism is not very good. While a blueprint can be followed to build a structure; carefull observation of the structure can be used to create a blueprint. No amount of observation and measurement of a banana will allow us to recreate the banana DNA. Richard Dawkins has suggested the analogy to origami is a much stronger than the blueprint analogy. I agree with his assesment but I wonder if even better analogies can be created. Any ideas?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCool experiment but I'm curious about what each step in the process accomplishes. What is happening when the salt water is added? What then happens when the soap is added? And then the alcohol?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce the DNA is separated, are there more experiments possible that show properties of the DNA? Like decomposing it into sugar, organic bases and phosphoric acid and performing identification experiments on those?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI actually don't think it's such a bad analogy. If one studies the proteins and RNAs within a cell it is simple to infer a large amount of information about that cell's DNA. The obvious difference is that the blueprint of a cell would have to contain more information than that encoded by DNA. But this is the problem of explaining complex concepts to the public--too much information engenders disinterest, while too little may be misleading. Honestly, if you had to explain the engineering principles that go into developing a blueprint I suspect you would lose most people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout that blueprint again. If you have a finished building it's relatively easy to reconstruct a blueprint from that. Not so for reconstructing the DNA sequence from an finished living being. You can better compare the workings of DNA with a cooking recipe. With the recipe it's easy to make a cake, but try to reconstruct the recipe once the cake is finished...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe salt-soap mixture "lyses", or breaks apart, the individual cell membranes in the banana, thus releasing the DNA molecules into the solution. The alcohol works to condense and precipitate the DNA into the compact form you get at the end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, you could equally say I'm seeing atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen etc., but what I'm really seeing is slimy mucus. How can I prove it's more than the equivalent of phlegm?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"How can I prove it's more than the chemical equivalent of phlegm?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy agarose gel electrophoresis followed by staining with the fluorescent dye, ethidium bromide:
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/genetics/biotech/gels/agardna.html
Excellent article and comments...Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe've linked to this over at Genome Engineering http://www.genome-engineering.com/extracting-dna-at-home.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust curious but wouldn't it be better to remove the banana/aqueous layer before gathering the DNA? It could be removed a turkey baster or syringe I think. Neat idea. Onions are good to but have the acid-problem. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUm...How do i get the deoxyribonucleic acid out. I tried but it always slip> D:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this