Class Room Genetics, Here I Come!

I posted a few days ago that I was going in to propose that I could help a local high school science teacher run an interactive genetics lab for her students during their upcoming genetics unit. I talked to her for several hours that day, having abandoned my original proposal of a strawberry DNA extraction for a human cheek cell DNA extraction followed by imaging of the student's samples with agarose gel electrophoresis.

This has been modified during the course of my research, and with the invaluable help of the contributors to the Diybio mailing list, which you all should most definitely join. Originally I was ignorantly going to try to run the electrophoresis on unbroken genomic DNA. What I didn't realize was that human chromosomes were entirely too long to be resolved by a gel except as a smear at the top of the gel where it gets stuck in the pores of the agarose.

Thanks to several online collaborators I've been able to figure out the specifics of the electrophoresis process (details of which are surprisingly vague online and in journal articles except for specific protocols, information which is pretty much useless except for the most basic information if you are running a different experiment), and more importantly, how to make a gel run which will have meaningful results that wont end with a smear of clumped and stuck DNA

I'll be publishing several articles here about what I've learned as soon as I get time. Right now I'm too busy doing the actual work of setting up the demo and getting organized to produce a digested record of what I've learned. In the mean time feel free to check out my threads on the Diybio mailing list (google groups) for a day to day reference and to see the process by which I got the information, and the other researchers who have helped me.