April 2nd. 2016 - 2:00pm
We got ourselves one full basket of strawberries. For science!
Important sidenote: Hannah is an early bird, which I had to learn the hard way today. Neither did I have any idea that there where people willing to get up this early on weekends, just to visit some kind of bio farmers market, nor that there was such an event being held practically right before my doorstep every saturday morning.
You're probably wondering right now, what we needed all the strawberries for, but this was actually pretty cool: I wanted some kind of proof, that Hannah would be able to get us some DNA, so she demonstrated me just how easy it was, to get pure genetic code out of strawberries, with nothing else then simple household stuff.
I admit, when she first whiped up some kind of mixture from Water, shampoo and salt and started to crush some strawberries in a plastic bag, my initial thought was that she was playing some delayed april fools joke.
But after a few minutes of waiting time, when she filtered the resulting strawberry sludge through a towel into pure alcohol, very fine, white, slimy threads began to form inside the glass. Since we used a considerable amount of strawberries in the process, we got ourselves a proper load of DNA - enough that it condensed to a sticky white goo, which we could easily fish out of the glass using a pastry fork.
My highly scientific insight, that it looked like "strawberry sperm" didn't quite find Hannah's approval, but honestly - I nailed it.
If you folks at home want to cook up some strawberry genes too, the internet is full of great advice on the subject. Just google "Extract strawberry DNA". Here's the video Hannah showed to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPGKv53zSRQ
»You think that in theory, this'll work on my DNA too?«, I asked Hannah after we were done.
»Not just in theory«, she assured me. »This is basically what forensic analysts are doing when solving a crime with DNA from blood samples. They don't use household stuff though«
In conclusion, dear friends, It looks like we have got to take a few liters of blood out of your Meggy during the next few days, to get out my sweet and delicious genetic information. Just in case I behave a little weird in the chat over the next week - that's why.
PS: the rest of the strawberries will be going on a trip into our stomaches later today, even though I will from now on always have to think about the gross, white mucus that's in there.
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Meg Out