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Asked by anon-285639 on 3 Mar 2021.
Question: Does DNA look good?
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Jess Buddle answered on 3 Mar 2021:
Great question!
DNA is really really tiny – it looks a bit like 2 pieces of rope twisted round eachother. However, when you extract the DNA from a bacteria, you can sometimes see it wiggling around in the test tube with your naked eye! This is my favourite thing to watch and it always makes me so excited that i can see something so tiny from inside a cell! It is seethrough and wiggly. Click this link to see what i mean!
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Alba Park de la Torriente answered on 3 Mar 2021:
DNA is so tiny that it is usually hard to see it with the naked eye. However, if you use a certain method of DNA extraction you can see some threads in the little tubes that contain it. DNA doesn’t have a particular colour so it’s not that evident at the beginning, but if you pay attention and you move the liquid in your tube, sometimes it is possible to see it.
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Felicity Hunter answered on 3 Mar 2021: last edited 3 Mar 2021 10:20 pm
Hi Abi, thanks for asking such a nice question.
DNA looks very cool! It is made up of two long strands which are joined together to form a shape which looks like a ladder. The ladder is then twisted into a spiral shape. This twisted ladder shape has a cool name: it is called a “double helix”.
Chemicals called “sugars” and “phosphates” make up the two sides of the ladder and chemicals called “bases” make up the steps of the ladder.
There are 4 different types of bases in the DNA ladder called “adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine”.
These 4 bases repeat in different patterns to form a code that tells the cells in your body what kind of materials to make!
You can think of your DNA as the blue-print of your body. It helps to design the way your body looks and works.
DNA is very tiny so scientists need extremely powerful microscopes to be able to see it. Did you know that a lady named Rosalind Franklin was one of the first people to successfully predict how DNA looks in the 1950s? What a great achievement.
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Lizzie Pendlington answered on 5 Mar 2021:
I think DNA does look pretty good – it coils around proteins neatly to fit into your cells, it has a funky double helix structure (not many other biological molecules in your body can say the same) and it codes for basically everything in living things!😎
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Claire Price answered on 6 Mar 2021:
You can extract DNA from fruit using household items in your kitchen and what you see looks a lot like snot! Because its lots of fibres containing DNA. If you have a really, really, really powerful microscope then DNA looks like a spiral. So yes, DNA does look good!
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