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Forensic Science 2009
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > Forensic Science 2009

Today, the students learned about DNA fingerprinting. To begin, the students learned about an autopsy and that sometimes a bacteria in the person's stomach could be found during an autopsy and might explain their death. Having found this bacteria, the students needed to test to see if it was harmful, or even deadly. This is when DNA fingerprinting came in.

Each student got a little vial that had a concentrated amount of bacteria in it, and then everyone got to go through the steps of DNA fingerprinting, which consists of culturing the bacteria, isolating bacterial DNA, digesting with restriction enzymes, and finally, gel electrophoresis. The students learned how to extract DNA from cells to how to identify the DNA and what kind of bacteria the DNA came from.