Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I really want to extract dna from an onion but i want my project to be original and it has be a question i can make a graph for, and so i was thinking maybe after i extract the dna, i could find something to do with it like clone the onion or something???? so if you could give me ideas, that would help me a lot, thank you very much!

Hi,

Just a really wild idea to get you thinking. Have you heard of electroporation? An introduction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroporation

http://www.biology-online.org/articles/ ... ssion.html


Perhaps you could find a way to introduce onion genes into another organism and prove they were expressed there? I have no idea whether this idea would work, but you might discover a lot of interesting things if you look into it.

Have fun!

Barrett Tomlinson

Unfortunately, a lot of those ideas require really expensive equipment that only a college or university might have.

I assume you are looking at this project: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p001.shtml

You could try seeing how the concentration of DNA that precipitates out of solution changes if you change the the concentration of salt added. For example, you could try adding 0, 0.75, and 1.5 grams to the solution and see how much DNA precipitates for each concentration.

You could use a UV Spectrophotometer to measure the concentration of the DNA (your school or a local high school might have one). The following website has a good description of how to do this:
http://people.hofstra.edu/beverly_clend ... NA&DNA.htm

UV spectrophotometry is an advanced topic for a middle school student, so there are probably quite a few words in there that you haven't heard of. Look them up online and hopefully that article will slowly make more sense to you.

If you have any other questions please reply to your original post, we'd love to help you.