Barcoding Biologists Master Micropipettes and Mini-gel Electrophoresis

The DNA barcoding biologists continue their project with mastering micro-pipetting and mini-gel electrophoresis

As part of the DNA barcoding project, Year 10 biologists need to develop expertise with micro-pipetting and DNA gel electrophoresis.

‘We have mini- gel tanks’ says Lily. ‘We need to place our DNA in the gels and separate it on the basis of size so we can send our samples to the Wellcome Genome Campus for sequencing. To make sure we know how to do this we have practiced using dyes with the gels. Agarose gels are like a mesh and large pieces of DNA (or large sized dyes) will move through the gel slowly but smaller sizes will move faster and thus further. We used micropipettes which measure volumes in microlitres, 1 microlitre is a thousand times smaller than 1 millilitre! We then used our micropipettes to add dyes to the agarose gel. These coloured dyes moved through the gel when electricity was applied. Placing or ‘loading’ the dyes in indents in the agarose gel was very tricky but it was good to practice so we can eventually load our DNA and not lose any in the process’.

The biologists are now ready to extract their DNA from their insects.