PCR your DNA Workshop

How do we go from showing the existence of DNA (strawberries, soap and alcohol) to the popular imagery of DNA gels?
This is a consolidated practical go-to version of workshops we have done as Hack-a-Taq and Citizen Science @ Bern. It highlights also the generic lab equipment. You can find similar protocols in other places. This is our documentation - we put together the "kit" and "home-made" protocols.

Workflow

With a group of 15-20 people with everyone participating, we see that this workflow can easily take the entire day.
You can stop and continue another time - after the DNA extraction and after the PCR.

1. Get Samples
2. Extract the DNA (PAUSE)
3. Amplify the gene of your interest using PCR (PAUSE)
4. Separate the PCR products by agarose gel electrophoresis
5. Visualize the PCR products (your amplified DNA bits)

What you need to Prepare

First, you need to decide what you will be looking for.
In the Bern Citizen Science Workshop, we decided to take samples from our fellow participants (human cheek epithelial cells) and amplify the serotonin transporter genes to look at the different (Long and Short) forms.
For the Hack-a-Taq, we wanted to see if we had any coliform contamination in the waters, and so we used primers to look for the bacteria.
Designing appropriate primers should be another section - but for many things, there are already primers reported in the literature. You can always start with google searches for PCR primers and the name of your gene of interest. For example, the coliform bacteria primers, we decided upon reading many papers that already checked for its efficacy and specificity.