 If only there was a good way to use genomics to find a good use for all these strawberries. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Luckily, you only need household items to do that. Otherwise, it would take us forever to set up. Let's get going. Okay, well it's super convenient you had a craving for strawberries because they're really easy to extract DNA from. We'll be experts in strawberry and DNA. Do you know how many copies of the genome that each strawberry cell has? I don't know how many. Eight. Eight. Eight. Four times more per cell than humans. So purifying DNA from a strawberry is really easy because it has so much DNA in it. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Awesome. It's sure awesome. No time to waste. Let's do some science. So let's just make sure we have all the materials we need. Yeah, no it's always good to get organized. Agreed. So first, one resealable plastic bag. So I tend to use the small ones. You can use the big ones, but small ones work really well. You're the expert, so I would listen to that. Okay. Two strawberries. Two strawberries. Very important. And if I remember right, it's actually very good to take off the green stems and get rid of them. Correct. Okay. I think you can use fresh or frozen. Two teaspoons of dish detergent. So we have the dish detergent, put that aside. Okay. And we have a teaspoon for measuring it. Perfect. All right, one teaspoon of salt. So here's a teaspoon for measuring, and here is the salt. Great. Okay, a half cup of water. So here we have a measuring cup, very full, half a cup of water. I'll just set that here. Perfect. Okay, two plastic cups. Got those right here. Okay. One coffee filter. Coffee, we actually have an extra, but yes, I have a coffee filter. You never know. Yeah. Might need to. Half cup of rubbing alcohol. We've got that right here. Yep. Gotta be careful with that. One coffee stirrer. And I got two just in case we do an extra. Wonderful. There you go. And it's probably most importantly, one scientist or in our case, two scientists. We got two. Yes. Okay, so you take the strawberries and what you have to do is to basically break up the strawberries first because then in the next step, we're gonna break open the cells that are in the strawberry to release the DNA. But to sort of help that process along, you really gotta unfortunately be a little mean to your strawberries. So you put them in the plastic bag and you seal up the plastic bag and then you're gonna gently just wanna start smashing those strawberries. And as best you can. Now, there's lots of techniques that can be used for this. You don't wanna get too violent because if you do, you could spray strawberries all over your kitchen table or all over yourself. But at the same time, you have to really work it good as much to get sort of a strawberry puree. We just keep getting this to the point that all the big pieces are broken up. And in doing so, you will then have it to the point where you could then go to the next step where you're gonna break open the individual cells in strawberries and let the DNA come floating into solution. Here's the thing. In this bag are smashed up strawberries with a bunch of individual cells in them. And maybe one way to think about it is like a water balloon. And that's the cell. And what we need to do is to break open that water balloon so that the DNA will come floating out. Now, like a water balloon, like you might use a nail to pop it. But for this, what you do when you're dealing with a cell is you use a detergent, like detergent you use for cleaning your kitchen. So we're gonna make a solution that's gonna both have detergent in it, but it's also gonna have other things like salt and water that make the DNA happy and comfortable floating around inside of it. So that's why we're gonna take this, what we call an extraction liquid, okay? Little concoction, sounds great. So I think you start, you add two teaspoons of the detergent. Okay, sounds great. You want some? No, no, I already had breakfast. Okay, just wanted to check. Looks good though. Two of those. One teaspoon of salt. Yeah, maybe you can use a different piece then. Yeah, good thing I have two. All right, perfect. And then remember we have that half a cup of water. Yes. That was poured to the very top. I'm gonna need you halfway. All right, thank you very much. And then I'll just pour it in using my skills as a scientist. And there you go. And now just to shake it up a little. A little shake, okay. Yeah, yeah. And what all you're really wanting to make sure to do is to make sure the salt gets into solution and that detergent sort of gets evenly dispersed throughout. Okay. Okay, so that's our extraction liquid. Cool. So now we're basically gonna use that detergent like a little pin to pop the water balloons, use the detergent to break open those strawberry cells. I'll open this up. Let's do it. Okay. And there we have it. And so now you seal it. Now here you can't smash. You don't even wanna smash because of course if you really start smashing, you might then you really spew out the liquid and that would cause a lot. And actually the other thing is you don't wanna be too tough with this because otherwise you get a lot of bubbles. But you just wanna sort of work this around just like you're making a smoothie by hand. And so, but here's the thing is that while all the DNA is now collecting in the liquid, if you look in there, you have a lot of other stuff that's in the way. Now, scientifically we might refer to that as cellular debris, but it's just the strawberry schmutz. And you gotta get rid of that strawberry schmutz. And so that's why we use a coffee filter. It's now time to get rid of this schmutz and get the liquid that'll contain the strawberry DNA. So maybe you could fold that for me. We're gonna use this as a filter. Now you can use a coffee filter. Sometimes you could use gauze if you happen to have some gauze in your house. You just do whatever it takes to filter out all that schmutz-y stuff that was in the strawberry and just let things slowly leak through, seep through like you're making drip coffee. So when most of the liquid has filtered through, what's good is to just remove that filter that contains all that strawberry schmutz and we can just put it on the side. We don't need that anymore. So this is basically the extraction liquid, which has the insides of all the cells of those strawberries and including the DNA. And in order to get the DNA to come out of solution, we do a scientific step, which is called precipitation, which is basically a way of getting a compound or molecule to sort of come out from being in a liquid state to being in a solid state. To do that, we use this rubbing alcohol, which you often wanna have it be a little bit cold and I know this was in the refrigerator and that's good. You just wanna add an equal amount. So what I always do is I just sort of estimate where my finger is and sort of the equal amount and you can just pour the alcohol up until that amount. And a little pour and then that's good, like that. And then what you wanna do is not be overly harsh with this, but you can sort of see there's almost like a layer, the alcohol's a bit on top, the extraction liquids on the bottom, when you just sort of roughly sort of gently swirl it around and then what you start to see forming sort of between those two layers is like a flocculent like material, sort of almost looks like cotton. And as you swirl more and more and it gets more and more mixed, you'll see more of it forming. And that flocculent material is the DNA. That's awesome. But you know, it's very whitish and it's sort of very viscous and what does it really look like in real life? It kind of looks like snot. It does look like snot. And so, and when you start to see big things as snot, then you know it's really working well. And you can even see here, as we've done this, you could really start to see some of this precipitated DNA forming. And we can get more in a bit, but what you can do is when you start to see it, that's where the coffee stir comes in. You can just sort of fish that out. Look at that, look at that. That's awesome. That is strawberry DNA, which again, to our eye, looks like a bunch of snot. But in fact, if we could look at a molecular level, it would just consist of that classical double helix, that sort of the iconic view of DNA. But this is purefied strawberry DNA. There's probably even more that you could get and you could if you wanted to keep swirling, but you can see you've gotten a tremendous amount there, which is great. And just imagine, you did all of this using materials that you have in your kitchen. So you can do science in your kitchen and do something as wonderful as isolate DNA from a strawberry. That is really cool. DNA extraction! Science is delicious. Especially the DNA.