What I did this summer...2008!
Do you recognize the building (and the person!) in the photo below? If you have ever watched the TV show House, then you have seen this building that, contrary to the TV show, isactually the Frist Campus Center at Princeton University. While my real reason for spending two weeks at Princeton this summer was to attend the HHMI DNA/Biotechnology workshop, we also happened to be on campus the day they were taping the aerial shots for House. Can you see the helicopter with the mounted camera?
Above is me preparing my buccal (cheek cell) DNA for electrophoresis (using an E-gel); to the right is the E-gel ("DNA fingerprint") showing my two D1S80 alleles...this is a common allele that used to be very common in forensic and paternity testing (because it's an individually unique sequence). The first bright band down you see in my lane (#2, the well is red; the other wells are other people in our lab) shows that I have 511 DNA bases in that allele; the second bright band down shows that I have 413 bases in that allele. This sequence is unique to only my DNA! If you are in my IB Bio or Forensics classes you will learn to read gels just like the one at the right...it's easy once you know how!
We also used PCR (a DNA amplification technique) to find soil microbes which had a special gene called p450. This gene codes for alkane hydroxlyase, an enzyme that "eats" or breaks down alkanes. Since fossil fuels are a type of alkane, these microbes can "eat" oil! We collected soil found in a crack under an oil spot in the parking lot, screened the soil for this gene (using PCR), and then ligated (inserted) this gene into a plasmid (a loop of DNA). We then put this plasmid with the "oil-eating gene" into a bacterium called E. coli (strain DH5α). We grew this transformed bacteria on agar. The next step is to send this specific p450 gene away for sequencing to see from which bacterium it came! If you want to look up something cool, Google "metagenomics"...it is how we found this gene amongst all the other critters living in our soil sample.