Extracting DNA from Lentils

Abe adding the cold alcohol layer

Surprisingly (to us, anyway), it's not hard to extract DNA from many types of plant and animal cells. You can find the very simple instructions here. It's pretty cool to see those long stringy white strands and realize that that stuff is actually DNA! We extracted ours from lentils, since that's what the link described. But it sounds like pretty much anything can work. And if you want to see your own DNA, you can extract some from your saliva--instructions here.

I wasn't sure if the contact solution had to be the special "protein removing" type, so we used pineapple juice for our enzymes, and that worked fine. But, based on other tutorials I've seen, the process really is not fussy--it looks like any type of contact solution will work also.

The stringy stuff floating up at the top is the DNA!