Strawberry Dna Extraction and Quantitative Hypothesis Development
We wanted to extract, see and analyze DNA from a single strawberry( 12. 11 g). The long, thick fibers of DNA store the information for the functioning of the chemistry of life. DNA is present in every cell of plants and animals. The DNA found in strawberry cells can be extracted using common, everyday materials. To start the procedure we needed the following supplies; one strawberry, one plastic cup, 10 ml of Cell Lysis Buffer (10% detergent, 1% NaCl), one plastic zip-lock bag, one coffee filter, and 25 ml of ice cold Ethanol.
The first step of the process was to obtain the weight of the plastic cup by itself, get a strawberry, remove the stem and leave, put it in the plastic cup and then record the weight of plastic cup with strawberry. The results of this first step was; weight of plastic cup: 9. 63 g, weight of plastic cup and strawberry: 21. 74 g. The following step was to place the strawberry in the zip-lock bag, close it and start smashing the strawberry until it was completely broken up, the strawberry had a smoothie-like look. 0 ml of Cell Lysis Buffer was added to the strawberry and gentle massaged it for about one minute. This buffer, which has detergent in it, is to dissolve the cell and nuclear membranes and salts to break the ionic bonds between the histones and DNA, it separates DNA from strawberry. During this step, my lab partner prepared the coffee filter to filter the solution as determine by our instructor. We pour the cell lysate on the coffee filter and allowed it to go through it, to help it, we used a spoon and gently pushed the substance to get the most liquid out of it without braking the coffee filter.
Before the filtration the texture looked solid, but after it looked like strawberry juice. Our instructor added 25 ml of ice cold ethanol to the cup and obtain the DNA. We could observe a solid white, mucus like material forming out of the “juice”. The excess of liquid was removed from the cup, and the cup and DNA was weighted, resulting of 10. 81 g, which was subtracted from the cup weight, having 1. 18 g as the weight of DNA. After this, we calculated the % of the strawberry that was DNA. We concluded that the DNA from strawberry was 9. 74%
