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Written by : Lois Carico |
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so dna is an absolutely fascinating biomolecule for all sorts of reasons but one of my favorite things about dna is that it's really big and also incredibly small all at the same time and what i mean by this is the length of a dna molecule is about the same as the height of a fully grown man so it's about 1.8 meters and that's in a single in a single cell at the same time the dna molecule is about 2 nanometers wide so we're talking in the order of a billionth of a of a meter so even with that said you can actually see your own dna or the dna of any any living organism really with your naked eye and all you need to be able to do that is household items that you probably have lying around so today in this video i'm going to show you how to see your own dna using a bit of salt water a bit of soap and a bit of rubbing alcohol and that's it so i'm gonna go buy those things and we are gonna get started this is all you need to extract your own your own dna we've got some salt water here so i've got one teaspoon of salt of just standard table salt in about 100 ml of water about half a glass of water and some dishwashing soap again just standard dishwashing soap will do just fine and some rubbing alcohol so isopropyl alcohol is good the higher the percentage the better this will work i only had 70 percent alcohol lying around but um anything higher than that will be even better that's essentially all we need and let's have a look at how we actually extract our own dna using this stuff so the first thing we need to do is collect the cells that will contain our dna most cells in your body will have dna right at the core of them in the nucleus so you can in theory get dna from a lot of different cells in your body but the easier cells to get the dna from in my in my opinion is cheek cells so we're going to rinse our mouth with the salt water solution and then just swish it around in your mouth for about a minute that should be enough time and essentially the salt will help the cells to clump together which will help get us as much dna out of those cells as we can so next up we want to work to add the dishwashing soap to the mouthwash solution so you only need to add a couple of drops here that should be plenty and you need to give it a little swirl so you want to avoid the dishwashing soap bubbling up too much that won't help us very much we just want to swirl so that the dishwashing soap is as mixed in with that mouthwash solution as possible without having too many too many soap bubbles so the point of this stage is is to break open our cells and to get access to that dna so it should it should be released into into the solution and out of the out of the cells so cells are surrounded by a plasma membrane and inside the cells dna itself is enclosed in a in a structure called a nucleus and that nucleus is also surrounded by by a plasma membrane so the chemical properties of soap break down the plasma membranes of both the the cell itself and of the nucleus the soap should essentially have the effect of releasing dna into the surrounding solution so that looks pretty good to me so what so what we've got here now is my dna sort of suspended in the in this solution in the salt water and so p solution we can't see it right now because dna dissolves in this solution what we want to do is precipitate it out of the solution and that's where the rubbing alcohol comes in so now we want to gently add the rubbing alcohol to this solution so you want to do this very very slowly and gently and you want to get the alcohol to rest on top of this solution if you can and that should do it so you can see that layer of isopropyl alcohol sitting on top of my solution there so now we wait for the dna to precipitate out of the um salt water and soap solution into the isopropyl alcohol solution that should take about three minutes three to four minutes and let's come back when it's done so after about four to five minutes you will start to see this cloudy sort of precipitate forming between the two layers of your saltwater solution and your soap solution and that is your dna folks so you might ask what can we do with this and the answer is not a whole lot this is just a fun home experiment to see your own your own dna it's not really how dna is extracted for anything for anything useful it's actually not that dissimilar to how we do it in the lab but of course you need you need slightly different chemicals that do similar things but um just more efficient and they're able to sort of give you much cleaner dna than we have here so that is it just a fun little video showing you how to extract and see your own your own dna using using basic household reagents you have probably have lying around it's a fun little experiment to do at home so if you've got some dish soap and rubbing alcohol you should definitely definitely give it a go so for me this experiment just kind of reminds me of where the the molecule that's responsible for the data that i work with on a daily basis comes from and it's quite cool to sort of actually see that with my own eyes every every once in a while it's a it's a fun little experiment so just a quick note um as well so because you you generally don't have that many cheek cells um at least cheek cells that will sort of come off when you when you do the mouthwash you're not going to have too much um too much dna to see you'll be able to see those wispy white strands but it's not it's not a huge amount if you do this experiment with plants so strawberries are a popular one to do this with you will get massive clumps of dna because plants have much bigger genomes most of them than we do so if you do this with strawberries you'll be able to literally pick out the dna from um from the solution but i think it's more interesting to see your own dna so that's why i did it with a with cheek cells here so that is it for this little video i will see you in the next one have fun trying this out you
Thanks for your comment Virgil Mcinroy, have a nice day.
- Lois Carico, Staff Member
hi this is Matt Baker today I'm going to show you five websites that I uploaded my DNA to and that you can upload yours to as well now previously on this channel I covered the various companies that will send you a special kit and then use that to extract your DNA transfer it into a digital format and then analyze it in order to give you some information about yourself usually this includes something about your ancestry and perhaps some health related information however the sites that I'll be talking about today are a bit different these companies don't send you a kit the assumption is that you've already tested your DNA somewhere else and that you simply want to upload your already existing DNA file in order to receive additional information beyond what you have already received so the websites that we'll be looking at today are genome link my true ancestry genetic life hacks Pro me fees and GED match but before I get into it I want to tell you about today's sponsor myheritage I actually asked my Heritage to sponsor this particular video because I figured that some of you out there might not have a DNA file ready to go and therefore you will need to get your DNA tested first before exploring the websites in today's video If this applies to you then myheritage is a great place to start their DNA test kit is one of the most affordable and easiest to use it costs around a hundred dollars but you can usually get it for much less because they often have major sales throughout the year you should also note that my Heritage uses the swab method for DNA collection which is much easier than the spit method all you have to do is take this little device that looks like a long Q-tip and rub it against the inside of your cheek for about 30 seconds the results you get that are pretty great you get a map of where your ancestors came from together with ethnicity percentages as well as relative matches but the really great thing about myheritage is that it is a full-blown family tree building website that gives you access to over 20 billion records and makes it really easy to discover who your ancestors were so if you haven't yet done a DNA test I recommend that you try out myheritage by using the link in the description or pinned comment be sure to use the code to get free shipping for the DNA kit as well as a 30-day free trial of myheritage's subscription plan then if you decide to keep the subscription you also get 50 off okay so let's assume that you've now already had your DNA tested and that you now want to try out some of the upload sites well the first thing you need to do is download your DNA file you can do this from most testing companies but as an example let me show you how to do it from my Heritage once you've logged in just go to DNA and select manage DNA kits then click on the three dots next to your kit number and select Download kit from there you can save your complete DNA profile as a simple text file you'll need this text file to use the various upload sites that I'm about to show you so the first site I want to talk about is called genome link it's a great place to start because much of the information you can get is free and you don't even need to give them your credit card to sign up the first thing they'll do is get you to upload that text file we just talked about the whole process is extremely fast and within min minutes you'll be looking at some results so you can see here that they give you a basic breakdown of your ancestry but since you've already tested your DNA you probably already know that by now the new information you're going to get is in the traits section here they give you about 50 traits for free there's some information about how well you absorb certain vitamins as well as some information about your physical traits personality Etc if you want to get more trait information you can use their streak feature basically you just need to access their website at least once a week and provide at least one bit of feedback each week so for example genome link predicted that I have a stronger tendency to be extroverted however I'm actually more of an introvert so I'm going to select no if you keep doing this week by week your streak goes up and you get access to more free traits you can also also simply pay 14 and get access to 200 more traits right away and if you stay on one of their plans you get new traits every week reports are a bit different you have to pay separately for each one of these and they range from around twenty dollars to around seventy dollars let me show you a few that are available this one's called the global ancestry report and it comes with some pretty cool graphics you can spin the globe around and see all the various ethnicities that were found in your DNA you can then learn about each ethnicity and even see which of your chromosomes has DNA from that group it's a great way to increase your knowledge of history and geography there is also this ancient ancestry report that told me that most of my ancient ancestors were shepherds and farmers and this Viking report that broke down my Viking ancestry in to several subcategories okay so the next site I want to show you is called my true ancestry this site is unique in that instead of comparing your DNA to large sample sets made up of various modern populations which is what most DNA companies do it instead Compares your DNA to several people whose bodies have been found at various archaeological sites so for example about 1000 years ago King Athol read the unready of England ordered the execution of all Danes living in his kingdom this led to an event known as the saint Bryce's Day Massacre in which 37 men were killed at a church in Oxford well in 2008 the remains of those victims were found and at least one had his DNA extracted and tested my true ancestry has over 500 such DNA profiles ranging from the prehistoric cheddar man who lived in a 7150 BCE to some poor bloke who died during the last major outbreak of the Bubonic plague in Western Europe which occurred in marsai France in 1720. so using this method my true ancestry has determined that I am about 25 Frankish which probably explains why I like Charlemagne so much but as you can see I've also got quite a bit of Celtic as well as some visigothic and danish Viking but here's what I find really cool instead of providing me with relative matches to living people it provides me with matches to their archaeological samples so my top result is to a woman from Norway who died around the year 1200. she was one of the three skeletons found in trodheim that were studied in 2017. the study showed that she died from a deadly pathogen found in her teeth they even did a facial reconstruction and gave her the name ragna now according to my true ancestry my DNA is 84 closer to ragna as compared to other users they even show me the chromosomes where we share DNA in common and the length of the Snips we share measured in centimorgans so once again to use my true ancestry the first thing you need to do is upload your DNA this site takes a little bit longer to analyze the results about 10 to 15 minutes but
Thanks Camelia your participation is very much appreciated
- Lois Carico
About the author
I've studied bioethics at St. John Fisher University in Rochester and I am an expert in response surface methodology. I usually feel blah. My previous job was occupational safety & health inspector I held this position for 6 years, I love talking about weaving and automobile maintenance. Huge fan of Olly Murs I practice wakeboarding and collect insects.
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