in today’s video we will be extracting dna from 24 pounds of strawberries [Music] [Applause] all right maybe you guys have seen this in your biology classes or going around online a common experiment that’s done in biology classes is to extract the dna out of different things you can take it from your cheek or from plants such as strawberries bananas and even kiwis are really good for taking dna out of even a blueberry even a blueberry everything has dna so dna is a cool stuff that makes you into what you are and makes everything that’s living into what it is but i was wondering what can you do with 24 pounds worth of dna so that’s what we’re gonna figure out the basic idea behind today’s video is to extract the dna from strawberries and see what we can do with a bunch of goo all right what’s step one all right well step one is get a lot of strawberries i think so what’s step two we’ve got a lot of strawberries step two is to get the dna out of them so it’s pretty simple pretty fun that’s what we brought grace along for we need to crush these strawberries it’s literally all i’m ever in these videos for you’re a great strawberry crusher i’m thinking we can put a bunch of strawberries into here and have grace go wine style on it stomp them it’s gonna be so squishy thanks kevin clean up crew my pants are rolled i feel like i look the part this is gonna feel very weird these are things that you never thought you were going to do in your life and um here you are so have you ever crushed grapes before no no how does that feel oh yeah just get some good running man going in there it smells super fruity in here i feel like as i’m squishing these i’m releasing a lot of their essential smells which is fantastic it’s been a very fruity day here in uh the studio we made a giant fruit cup earlier and so that was very fruity smelling and now we’ve got strawberries so solid day if you ask me that’s looking good grace thank you so our next step is actually we’re going to add our lysis buffer or just a salt water and soap which will actually help to break holes in these cells that you’ve started to separate by this physical stretching water and soap now we’ve got our salt water and the reason that we want this salt water is that it’s actually going to bind to our dna as it’s coming out of our cells and in order to get that out of there we need to poke holes in our cells which is where our soap comes in so cells on the science level are actually made up of the same type of molecules that soaps are which are fats and this soap will poke holes in the cells and the salts will pull the dna right out and the more smash the better remember cells are so tiny that you can’t see them so all of these chunks in here are still made up of hundreds it’s like really going between my toes and it feels really funky you ready for a bath no i’m already in a bath it was very cool now what do i do keep stomping mix up all that soapy salt water with the strawberries so when we’re pulling these out tell us about what goes together so the c and the g goes together correct oh yeah so dna is made up of those four letters that you said beforehand a t c and g adenine cytosine guanine and thymine boom there we go so the a and the t are married together they like to make these bonds right and the c and the g like each other cool you don’t like them to mix around and when they do we call that a mutation so when you have cancer it’s normally because you’ve had an a matches with a c or a g matches with a t which all of a sudden says this shouldn’t be happening so what’s really interesting is my sister actually has a genetic mutation she has nf1 and so basically on her 17th chromosome and her 22nd exon she has a double t so her dna says hold on i don’t have an a here i have two t’s here matching up and her dna stops duplicating i like that you brought in the fact that she has this genetic condition because one of the cool things that scientists are able to do with dna similar to this is we can actually use medications to go in and change that mutation so someday not too far away from now your sister could have that a or that t turned back to an a all right cool grace that looks fairly well mushed up so it feels quite mushy it looks like tomato sauce it smells better though smells great all right well i guess the next step is we want to get rid of the chunks and just kind of filter in some of the juice okay into here so the the cells are so small that they’ll actually be able to pass through the filter uh so everything that’s in the liquid will be proteins and cells and everything that gets caught will be stuff that we don’t want [Music] all right so we have all of our strawberry juice in here grace this is thanks to your beautiful stomping it was teamwork i stomped you guys siphoned i mean yeah what more could you ask for nate strained and now we have this tube of our strawberry juice so if you look in here what you can see is that in our strawberry juice you actually see these like white clusters and clumps in here and so what this is is some of it’s actually going to be cell material but a lot of this is actually the protein and the dna that’s starting to clump together inside of our mixture so we have just one step left we’re going to add our what is it oh geez i love the excitement grace i love it science makes me happy so we’re going to add our cold isopropyl alcohol or ethanol and what this is going to do is that it’s actually going to separate the dna from the water so why do we need the cold alcohol so using cold alcohol in cold water is good because it’ll actually slow down the enzymatic activity of the proteins that want to degrade free dna because if there’s free dna out there that’s what viruses have you don’t want them sticking around so this will stop our dna from getting broken down and allow us to extract it i like it so this is really cool actually if you look in here right now you can already see see this thickness as it’s separating so this thickness is all dna that’s it’s dirty dna right now so it’s it’s incorporated with rna and proteins but yeah everything that’s starting to come up right here that is all the dna from these strawberries no way yep wow [Music] i did this in high school on a small scale but on a bigger scale it is way way cooler i have never done this at this large of scale either nor have i ever seen it so i’m really excited to see this when you’re doing this on a small scale at home the real key to this is you want to have about equal parts ethanol as you do your actual mix and then the more that you let it sit the more that this is going to rise up through there i don’t know about you guys but from the scientist perspective what i think is amazing is that this stuff that’s in your hands right now is the exact instructions that make the whole plant so all you need is to start with this and that makes the whole strawberry plant the berries and everything and it’s the same stuff that’s inside of every single one of your cells so the reason that your eyes are green or blue or brown is all due to the instructions in this dna so another fun dna fact is that as you can see you’re pulling this all out but it all folds onto itself right so it really wants to be with its friends exactly it’s attracted to itself but if you’re able to pull just a single strand from one cell out and stretch it all the way out your dna would reach about five feet and that’s from a single cell that’s almost as tall as me [Music] so this is also really cool so the the ethanol it’s non-polar right so it’s kind of like spreading all of the the dna out together so look at how like fluffy this looks kind of like cotton candy but then once you pull it out it just like condenses onto itself again and so we had that big chunk of fluff and all it looks like when it’s out here is this little bit of slime if you guys have any other science experiments you’d like to see us scale up let us know or if you have any ideas of what to do with this dna drop a line down in the comments thanks for watching guys if you enjoy this kind of content don’t forget to hit the subscribe button right down in the corner till next time see you later Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYmGYbD1yEY
