 Hi I'm Dr. Eric Green. I'm the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health and I'm here with my wonderful sidekick. I'm Dr. Carly Easter also at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health and I'm the Education Specialist. And today we're here to isolate strawberry DNA using household things I guess. Basically we are going to show you how to get DNA out of a strawberry. Great. And why do we pick strawberries? Well so for me there are many reasons. The first of all they smell really nice. They're very pretty. The other thing is they're nice and edible and their seeds are on the outside of the strawberry and I have found that it's very easy to get DNA out of a strawberry. Yeah. Although of course like all living things they have DNA we could pick a variety of different other things to purify DNA from. We just pick strawberries because it's easy and they're easy to get. There we go. So. Okay. You ready to start? Yep. What do we do? So the first thing we're going to do is take our frozen strawberries you notice they don't look like those nice strawberries and we're gonna place them into this plastic bag. And now you could purify DNA from these strawberries or these. We just picked frozen ones because they're squishier and mushier right and we're gonna and you can get them any time of the year. Yeah that's true. Okay so we're putting it here in the plastic bag. Yep. And the reason we're doing that is because the first thing we need to do is blast them open. You get that's right. Okay. That's right. And the reason for that is that the DNA is inside the cells in that strawberry and we gotta get that DNA to sort of go into solution so that we can purify it. So we do this and I'm gonna smash I'm gonna point this towards you just in case it breaks open but I know my job here is just to smash them all up. Smash them up. Excellent. So while Dr. Green is smashing I'm going to make what's called a lysis solution. Lysis. Lysis. What is lysis? So lysis means to break open and the purpose of the lysis solution is to break open the strawberry cells to get to the DNA which as Dr. Green said is inside the strawberries. And a cell is just basically a bag of living materials and living different kinds of molecules surrounded by a membrane sort of thing maybe like saran wrap or we can think of it actually like a water balloon and we need inside instead of water there actually is water but in there is also DNA and we're gonna do us use a solution to bust open these cells or bust up on these teeny teeny little water balloons. Excellent. So we're gonna use household chemicals as we said at the beginning this is just regular detergent. Just like for cleaning dishes. Exactly. Or you could use hand soap or shampoo. Works really well. So two teaspoons of detergent. We're gonna take a half a teaspoon of salt and then we're going to add half a cup of water. Okay. And I'm going to stir this up. Okay. I think the strawberry puree is already ready to go. Perfect. So here we go. Detergent and the salt together are gonna just bust open those little cells, those little water balloons. I'm gonna do this and I know I'm not supposed to pound on it anymore otherwise we actually will get a shower. There we go. With soap and all. So the point is you don't want to create a lot of bubbles as you're mixing the lysis solution around with your strawberry puree. Otherwise you just have a bubble bath. That's right. Okay. So we're just and I can hear the water balloons just busting out from the side. And you hear that DNA coming out? It is. And it's saying I'm free. I'm free. I'm liberated. I'm in solution now. Excellent. Okay. But now we have all bits and pieces of strawberries mixed in with all this liquid. So that's probably a little bit too icky for what we need to do. It would be very hard for us to see the DNA in this mess that we've created. Right. So what we're going to do is filter. And as you can see I'm using just a regular coffee filter. Just one that you would use for making coffee at home in a coffee maker. And it's just going to pull out. It's just going to separate out the liquid from the strawberry gook. Gook is a technical term we use here in genetics all the time. Yeah. So we're going to pour. We don't actually need all of it. We just need a good amount. Right. Exactly. And what I'm going to do is just fold the edges up and make just a small little sack. And this just makes it easier to push the DNA that's in the liquid away from the big pieces of strawberry. And you want to be gentle. You don't want to squeeze so hard that you actually break the filter. Otherwise the gook will go back in there. It's like coffee grounds. It would just get in your coffee. Exactly. Okay. Does that look good? Looks good. Perfect. All right. So this is basically the material that was in the cells of the strawberry. And it has lots and lots and lots of different kinds of chemicals in there because all the contents of a strawberry cell. But the good news is a lot of DNA should be there because strawberries have a lot of DNA. And so we need to get the DNA out of solution because it's now dissolved in that in the in the detergent. So we're going to do what's called precipitation. Okay. Precipitation. Precipitation. So it's going to rain. It's going to rain basically. So when you think about precipitation in this case, hopefully if we've done this right the DNA will fall out of solution. We'll actually get to see the DNA start to form just as the rain comes out of the clouds or the snow. We'll see DNA start to form in our solution here. Or in science or in particular in chemistry when you talk about precipitation, it's often about something that's in solution becoming solid again or becoming material that you could then see and manipulate not in a liquid form. And so we're going to try to get the DNA to come out of solution. Excellent. So to do that, what do we do? We're going to use just regular rubbing alcohol. So just any old rubbing alcohol that you would buy in any old drug store. Right. Okay. And this is not the alcohol you drink? Nope, certainly not. And we're just going to pour an equal amount right to the strawberry juice, if you will. So I'll just carefully pour about there. Perfect. And what you immediately see of course is almost like two different layers forming. Exactly. You can see two different sort of phases. So you have all that red stuff that's at the bottom. And then we've got something that's forming up here in the top. Slimy, gunky, gross, almost like snot or a cotton ball. Sort of cotton ball in liquid. Excellent. Interesting is that the redness of the strawberry is not on the upper layer. It's in the lower layer. And so what's the gunky, slimy stuff? I don't know. I think it's the DNA. What do you think it is? I remember in medical school, you know, in medical school, we started with strawberries and we learned strawberry medicine. And here we go. So yeah, so you can sort of see the DNA precipitating, coming out of solution into a solid form. And there's a lot of it. Awesome. So you can see that nicely. So I guess we can use something, and we just happen to hear a popsicle stick with a little bit notch to go in. And we can just touch it and very easily pick it up. It looks like just a big old slimy wad of strawberry DNA. That's awesome. Now that you have it, you have it separated, this is purified DNA. And what's amazing is that it has no red with it at all. It's just totally white, which is exactly what DNA should be. What can you do with this after you've done it? So I always tell the students when I'm doing this in the classroom that first of all, this is extremely dirty. So if we were going to do any sort of experimentation, we'd want to clean it up. But one of the things you could do is actually analyze this DNA. So just as you would watch CSI or any of those other forensic shows, this is the same way they would isolate DNA from skin or from blood or anything just using different chemicals. So the opportunity would be to now analyze it and sort of figure out what is it, where is it from? All right. Now, so this of course is strawberry DNA, but in hospitals increasingly now we're purifying DNA from blood or from scrapes from inside of your cheek and doing all sorts of medical tests. And that in many ways is the future of medicine is looking at humans DNA and trying to figure out things about it that may be relevant for your health. And now for students at home who actually do this, can they save this DNA? How do they do that? Actually, you could put it into a sealed container and put it in the refrigerator and it would stay for a long time. Like a like a Ziploc bag or a small tube as long as you could seal it up. Okay. So so if they want to do this at home, what are they? How do they get instructions to figure out how to do this? You could visit our website and just go and look at the instructions and do exactly what Dr. Green and I did here and isolate your own strawberry DNA. Point by point, tell them exactly what to do. Those instructions are on our website. Well, that's great. Okay. So this was wonderful. Thanks for helping me do this. And I hope everybody enjoyed it.