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.