Great day. We very cool people that went along are now world record holders. We constructed the longest model chain of DNA ever. It was over 20m long, was intensely colourful and contained 1118 base pairs. Making it over 3 times as long as the previous world record!
The bus journey to hudds as usual wasnt fun. I hate buses. Met Beckie at the station. I went and grabbed a second breakfast from mcdonalds and ate it on the way to the university. Got there 30 mins early so hung around until Anthony and Lucy turned up. We were the first people to arrive, apart from those helping set up. We didnt have to wait too long for Miss Lewis to turn up. Safia and the other two asian girls didnt turn up until after half past 9, when everyone was supposed to be ready!
There were talks throughout the day that were pretty interesting. We asked to sort ourselves into pairs, and were then given a set of DNA molymods to use for the day. These had the specific pieces needed for the piece of the Insulin gene each pair had to make. Me and Anthony were doing the 9th sequence. They gave us information on how to construct it. Like do the complementary base pairs in order first. Have the holes towards you and the sense strand was on the right. The 5 prime end had to be at the bottom of the sense strand, with a phosphate group on the end etc. We had 2 practice runs at it so we knew what we were doing.
The food wasnt bad. There was quite a lot of it. So i was happy. When we made it for the recor Me and Anthony managed to build our strand in about 8mins. Lucy and Zoe beat us but they started with fully constructed phosphate-sugar backbones (cheaters). But we were the first table to finish and so asked for T-Shirts, which we should be getting! The 51 sequences were strung together at the end and hung up to produce a 20m long double helix of DNA.
I will add a little more tomorrow but it includes a surprise that i dont want to spoil in case they are reading this.
We got chocolate eggs at the end which was great. Train back home with Beckie and Lucy. Off out to An Inspector Calls tonight!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Sounds like a good day, but clearly it would have been nothing without the food. And the chocolate eggs. :) You missed a hell of a biology lesson: just ask Miss Edgeley to show you the PCR song tomorrow. It is Awful.
Post a Comment