Lab banana

(Lesson Courtesy Level: Grades 5-9. Time required: 25 mins. of teacher prep time and one 45 min.-class period. Overview In this lab activity, students in grades 5 through 9 use a salt/detergent mixture to solubilize a piece of a banana, then add cold ethanol to precipitate a froth of white DNA from solution. With careful technique the slender threads are wound onto a glass rod for observation of deoxyribonucleic acid, the master code or blueprint of all organisms. Learning Objectives At completion of this activity, learner will: 1. Have successfully extracted DNA from a banana, given the materials provided. 2. Observe, handle, and describe a crude preparation of life’s hereditary material. 3. Have the opportunity to use prior and newly acquired knowledge to draw conclusions regarding the structure and function of DNA. 4. Have separated cellular components according to the standard scientific approach of exploiting chemical differences between the molecules of the cellular milieu. Standards Standard A: Science as Inquiry – In completion of this activity, students will investigate cell structure and the methods to extract DNA. Standard C: Life Sciences – In completion of this activity, students will examine eukaryotic cell structure and investigate the function and the structure of DNA in living organisms. Students. Students explore DNA as being the molecular basis of heredity Student Prior Knowledge For students who have prior knowledge of the structure and nature of DNA, t...

The World Needs More Ideas Like the MIT Banana Lounge Photo by Iain Cheeseman/Twitter I eat a banana, like, every day. I try to, anyway. A banana is a phenomenal snack: an inexpensive, delightful, and sweet yet guilt-free treat packed with vitamins and nutrients, and one which has the added benefit of coming wrapped in its own easy-to-hold natural packaging. I am an unrepentant banana-vangelist, and anytime someone complains about a cramped-up muscle, you better believe they’re getting The Potassium Talk from the likes of me. Eat bananas. So I was elated to learn this week about a phenomenon concocted by the brainiacs at MIT called the MIT Banana Lounge. The details were shared by similarly elated MIT professor Iain Cheeseman in a series of tweets on Monday: Welcome to the inside story of the MIT Banana Lounge. If you’re just tuning in, I learned about a fantastical room — Iain Cheeseman (@iaincheeseman) The concept is a simple and beautiful one. It is, as the name suggests, a lounge on MIT’s campus that is absolutely loaded with crates upon crates of bananas. Students can drop by and pick up a banana real quick at any time, for free. Why does the Banana Lounge exist? Well, for one thing, this is part of a long tradition of whimsy at MIT, in line with things like As for the lounge itself, you can find it in a room in the institute’s Compton Laboratories building, from which undergrads have been sourcing, storing, and distributing bananas in this wonderful fashion since 2...

What did scientists do to bananas? A fungal disease called Fusarium wilt or Panama disease nearly wiped out the Gros Michel and brought the global banana export industry to the brink of collapse. A soilborne pathogen was to blame: The fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc) infected the plants’ root and vascular system. Which has more DNA strawberry or banana? Strawberries are soft and easy to pulverize. Strawberries have large genomes; they are octoploid, which means they have eight of each type of chromosome in each cell. Thus, strawberries are an exceptional fruit to use in DNA extraction labs and strawberries yield more DNA than any other fruit (i.e. banana, kiwi, etc.). See also Are Bananas Dying Off? Do bananas have DNA? Just like us, banana plants have genes and DNA in their cells, and just like us, their DNA determines their traits. Why does my banana taste like chemicals? “ When bananas ripen, they produce a range of smelly chemicals known as ‘esters’. These types of chemical compounds are responsible for many fruity smells and flavours that we regularly encounter,” Duggan says. “A few different esters contribute to the banana smell, but the most distinctive is called ‘isoamyl acetate’. Are all bananas clones? Despite their smooth texture, bananas actually do have small seeds inside, but they are commercially propagated through cuttings which means that all bananas are actually clones of each other. Banana fruits are parthenocarpic, which means that they do...