Oak Forest HS Students Extract DNA from Strawberries

Oak Forest High School Junior Emma Boswell displays the DNA strand she and her group extracted from strawberries in Oak Forest High School teacher Ron Czarnecki’s Biology class. Students in Czarnecki’s class are working on a heredity unit and learning about genetics and the proteins that are created within the nucleus of a cell. Boswell said that the strawberry has eight times the DNA of regular fruits and vegetables and, therefore, is easy to see and to extract. She said that the lab was very fun and easy to do. Students in Czarnecki’s class pureed strawberries in a ziploc bag and then added a mixture of salt and Ivory dish soap as part of the strawberry DNA extraction lab. Then students poured the strawberry mixture through a coffee filter over a beaker and squeezed the remaining liquid out. After removing the filter, students carefully poured ice cold rubbing alcohol into the beaker which formed a thick layer on top of the strawberry liquid. Strawberry DNA was viewable to the naked eye; it appeared as gooey, white, stringy matter, which students collected with a paperclip. Boswell said that her group’s lab was successful because they did indeed find the DNA that they were supposed to find when they filtered their DNA puree. She said, “The white gooey substance that we picked up with the paperclip proved that it was DNA.”