Bioinformatics Summer Academy!:) By: Jessica Giri

Extracting DNA from fruits! I have heard about getting DNA from many other things but I never knew that we could get DNA from something simple as kitchen ingredients. How I got a strawberry DNA is by first smashing the strawberries in a zip lock bag. And then making a lyses solution by mixing salt, water and soap together. Third, stir the lyses solution and put it in the zip lock bag with the smashed strawberries. And then, put the coffee filter over a plastic cup. Lastly, mix it with alcohol and wait a couple seconds and you have your DNA.

Computer Science/BLAST! We used BLAST to find what type of genes matched for what we were searching for. It was cool how homo sapiens (human) and chimpanzee/ monkeys and horses have same type of genes.

Likes I like the way all the teachers went into depth about their topics. Everyone was there to help. I liked the way they made learning fun.

Dislikes More experiments Didn’t get many chances to interact with other students.

Overall It was worth taking this class because I learned more about computer science and bio. It was very interesting to learn and gain a lot of experiments from bioinformatics. Thank you to all the teachers for all the help and for their time.