DNA fingerprinting at Bioclub

Last month, I co-organized a DNA fingerprinting workshop at Bioclub, Shibuya. The workshop consisted of a pre-orientation session on Tuesday and 2 days of wet lab experiments during the weekend.

We had a total of 5 attendants, and it was quite challenging to coordinate all of them to complete the workshop in time. Fortunately, the students were all extremely nice and never had a problem with them.

I spent quite a lot of time creating the slides of the pre-orientation session. You can see them above if you want to know the details of the workshop. On Saturday, we extracted DNA from pig and cow liver and amplified a region of the mitochondrial DNA called Cytochrome B by using PCR. Then we mixed the PCR product with a solution of taq1 restriction enzyme and let it digest overnight. On Sunday, we conducted a gel electrophoresis to identify the length of DNA fragments that remained after the digestion. The pattern observed allowed us to distinguish pig tissues from cow tissues.