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Asked by anon-371104 to Sophie on 6 Nov 2023.
Question: have you extract dna from somthing
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Sophie Shaw answered on 6 Nov 2023:
Yes! When I used to work in a laboratory I extracted DNA from yeast and bacteria. When I became a bioinformatician, I started to work on DNA that other people had extracted and this comes from lots of different places including humans, frogs, rice, sheep, and even poo!
Comments
Nikoleta commented on :
Yes! From a banana, yeast, and bacteria. It was fun!
Michael C commented on :
Yes! I extract DNA from microbes that live in extreme environments. My earlier projects involved extracting DNA from worms, plants and animal poo!
Martha commented on :
Yes. I extract DNA from nematodes( worms)
Laura commented on :
I extract DNA from lots of different human samples for us to test for genetic changes on. The most common sample we extract DNA from in the lab is a blood sample. We also extract from skin, saliva, hair roots and tissue samples.
The coolest thing we can extract DNA from in my opinion is when a baby is growing in the womb, we can take a sample of the fluid surrounding the baby and extract DNA from this to find out the genetic information of the baby before it’s even born! This can be quite invasive though so there’s a new way for some labs to extract fetal DNA with low risk. When a woman is pregnant, some fetal DNA enters the bloodstream, and there is now a way to take a blood sample from mum, and split the DNA we get from it into mum and baby’s to be tested! This is called cell-free DNA (cf-DNA). This test doesn’t tell us enough information on its own but acts as a screening tool, reducing the number of patients who will then get the invasive testing.
Cancers also have their own DNA which is different to the person who develops the cancer. Finding out the genetics of a cancer can help us to figure out what type it is and can even help to decide which treatment will be the most successful. Similar to the cf-DNA I mentioned above, when a cancer is developing, genetic material can enter the blood stream. Some labs can then take a blood sample and extract DNA from blood and split this into the patient’s normal DNA and cancer DNA to test on. This is called circulating tumour DNA (ct-DNA).