We went to a DNA Day at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge. The institute is a group of big buildings that work on the DNA which lives in the nucleus of a living organism’s cells. I think it was really interesting. We have learnt about living organisms already, and about the cells and the nucleuses and all that, but since this was a proper institute, they told us lots of facts I don’t think we would have learned if we hadn’t gone to the workshop. Also it told us about the institute and what it works on, but in average history books it wouldn’t have done. It was fun and helpful too. The people working at the institute started their DNA researches in the late 1900s by extracting the DNA from farm animals. Dolly, a sheep, is famous from being created from scratch out of a different sheep’s DNA. It’s called ‘cloning’ when people take the stuff from the nucleus of living organisms and build it from scratch. Unfortunately, farm animals that scientists have constructed have died within short notice. I still think that cloning was a brilliantly interesting idea.
DNA stands for d(eoxyribo) n(ucleic) a(cid). I was hoping that at this workshop we could clone some strawberries, though I knew this would be impossible for us; instead we extracted the deoxyribo nucleic acid from the tasty strawberries. To do this, we went through a long ritual with the fruits and acids and this, that and the other. It was quite fun, but scary when handling all the chemicals. The most dangerous chemical the boss was telling us about was alcohol. I’m sure you have all heard of this before and recognise it from the wineglass of your red wine positioned on the table just ahead of you, but this alcohol was entirely pure. It had no other chemical or acid inside the frozen, toxic bottle. It’s called ethanol. The boss was saying things like, “If you get just a spot of this liqud on any bare skin, the skin will burn off and be left flaked, thin, scabbed and dry,” or, “As soon as you have spilt any, call for a member of staff and they shall get the First Aid kit and bandage any damaged skin, and you shall be taken home,” and ended with stuff like, “Am I clear?”
So we carefully got a ZipLock bag and let the box of strawberries tumble into it. Then we took some acids and chemicals like vinegar and salt and zipped up the ZipLock. Unfortunately it didn’t want to lock, so we had to hold it upright whilst doing our job in case the contents fell out and were misused. ‘Our job’ was actually a less scientific-sounding scrumsh. We had to hold onto the top of the ZipLock bag and scrumsh the contents with our free gloved hand. Even though we were only touching the plastic on the outside of the bag, you could feel the squished strawberries, as well as seeing their gloopy pulp. The washing-up liquid seemed to make it very thick and slimy – but we liked that, because it felt more scientific. When it was all in a sort of pulpy, thick soup, we poured it into a filter and managed to get a pool of runny liquid, though slowly. We each got a test tube and filled it up just three quarters of an inch or so up with the Strawberry & Chemical juice. It may sound alright but it was slightly disgusting! Then we had to handle the alcohol. We got a pepette each and squirted just a little of the alcohol very slowly into the test tube at an angle of about 40 degrees, I think I heard them say. It was brilliant!
But hold it..
Why were we doing this? Well, the chemicals in the bag produced the pulp, which carried lots of DNA. When we removed the pulpy stuff and filtered it to a liquid, we managed to get bits of this DNA. When we used the alcohol, a little misty white bubble-cloud appeared on the small surface. This was……
DNA!
We had extracted the.. Wait, see if I remember… the deosomethingribo…nuclear?….chem…acid! I will now check. It was deoxyribo nucleic acid. Close. I said deosomethingribonuclear?acid. I was actually really close. So! I extracted the deoxyribo nucleic acid from strawberries. Isn’t that so interesting? I think it certainly is. I’m ready to go round again!
But before we left we had a tour. There were loads of scientific laboratories and everything. It was so cool! Some of the scientists had made a clever lawn-mower that moved automatically without anyone pushing it. When we went into the neatly cut field, we kept getting bashed by it because of how it worked blindly! It was amazing though. Before we left we were given some sheets and instruction pages on how to make a Double Helix (the shape of DNA). There’s also one out of sweets but we haven’t done that yet. I’m definitely ready to go round again!