Extracting Our Own DNA

Today we went to the health services at 8 to have our blood drawn. Class started later than usual, at 10, because some of us still had to get breakfast. Here is a rough description of how we get the DNA from the blood. We centrifuged the blood and take out the part that contains DNA and then add some chemicals to the part that contains DNA in order to separate DNA from other substances. We repeated this process many times and at the end DNA precipitated when we added ethanol to the liquid. We took our DNA and  then dissolved it in a chemical and then incubated it for the follow-up experiments.

It was exciting extracting DNA from ourselves.We extracted our own blueprint - half of the blueprint to be exact. People used to think that DNA contains every bit of information to make an organism; now we know that the regulation of DNA, or epigenetics, plays an equally important role as blueprint of life, but in a much subtle and complex way.