Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi there,
I am expanding on a science project I did last year. Last year I extracted DNA from bananas of 3 stage of ripeness. This year I am working on extracting DNA from bananas from three different places in the world, I want to know if the bananas of these three different regions are related

I can do the extracting but am hung up on how to analyze and compare the dna strands. How can I tell the difference.

Is this even something that is doable?

Hi,

You can investigate these projecst to characterize DNA:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p009.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... 4&from=TSW

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... 4&from=TSW

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... 4&from=TSW

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... =28&t=5297

If you are creative and have access to a good mentor I think this project may be doable. Alternatively you may be able to use gene banks to find sequences from different banana species to compare. I encourage you to have a go at it.

It looks like the banana genome is being sequenced:

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articl ... nome.shtml

http://fire.biol.wwu.edu/trent/trent/banana.pdf

http://www.intl-pag.org/18/abstracts/W1 ... I_075.html

http://www.brazzilmag.com/index.php?opt ... &Itemid=49

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p1331t6682015422/

Pay particular attention to these:

http://www.musagenomics.org/

http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/ae216e/ae216e0o.htm

I hope this info provokes your curiosity. Have fun!

Best regards,

Barrett L. Tomlinson