DNA Extractions!

So in our 7th grade classroom we extracted DNA from our cheek cells AND from bananas - all in less than an hour. Well it is a MUCH bigger task to extract DNA from over 300 little tubes of Mountain Plover blood. I showed up on Monday morning to the Fort Collins Science Center with five boxes of tubes of blood:

 In this box I have it arranged so the tube on the left is the adult and the two or three directly to the right are the chicks. Here's what a tube of Mountain Plover blood looks like:

So the first step was the get the blood out of the tubes and put it into a buffer, because the blood is pretty thick and we need to dilute it.

 The next thing we did was to add two other chemicals that help to break down the parts of the cell so we can get at the DNA. We used shampoo in class to do the same thing. You can imagine this took a LONG time since there were over THREE HUNDRED TUBES!

 

When we finally got all of the secondary tubes (the smaller sample of blood with the chemicals to break down the cells) we then put them in incubators overnight. The middle incubator shakes the tubes as well to mix the contents up.

I'm baaaaaaaack...

Hey Everybody,

So I'm temporarily resurrecting this blog for a week so I can tell my 7th Grade students at Brody Middle School (where I'm serving as a resident scientist as part of my NSF GK-12 Fellowship) about my week at the USGS Fort Collins Science Research Center! I'm working with Dr. Sara Oyler-McCance and Jennifer Fike in the Molecular Ecology Laboratory to examine the DNA in blood samples from Mountain Plover chicks and the adult that was looking after them.

On Sunday the 2nd of December I drove the whole way out from Ames, Iowa to Fort Collins, Colorado! The trip is almost 700 miles, most of this through Nebraska. I'd made this exact trip once before with my brother, so I knew what to expect, but it was still a struggle! I'll admit that I had to stop in Nebraska to take a half-hour nap just so I could make it the rest of the way. For those of you that have never driven across central Nebraska, by the Platte River, it is FLAT!

 

I took this picture from an overpass on I-80 - the tallest thing for MILES.

Anyway, the GPS on my phone sent me kind of a round-about way to Fort Collins. Instead of taking the interstate the whole way it had me go through some small towns and state highways through northeast Colorado. I was a little nervous about running into deer in the dark, since there were far fewer cars on these highways than the interstate, but it looked like the trip would be quite a bit faster. One added bonus was that it sent me past the Pawnee National Grasslands, where some of the first research on Mountain Plovers took place.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of the sign, even though it was dark out.

I made it safely to the hotel and checked in at about 9:30 Fort Collins time (Mountain), which is 10:30 Des Moines and Ames (Central). I was pretty tired! Although I was able to talk on the phone and listen to the radio and audiobooks while I drove, over ten hours on the road is a lot by yourself. And I get to do it again in less than a week!

Next post: what to do with the blood!