If you'd like to store some of yours or your family members' DNA for the future, a DNA snowglobe is an attractive container with a practical use.
The DNA Snowglobe Store is akin to the the Build-A-Bear store, where you choose your own decorative pieces for the inside. Then a professional will take your DNA sample and properly assemble and seal your personal snowglobe.
It will be ready to be picked up in about an hour, but will last for a lifetime. (Don't drop it!)-- xandram, Oct 19 2011 ...one thing that I read here... http://www.duerinck.com/archvdna.html [xandram, Oct 19 2011] DNA cloud-like image http://www.vivo.col...ech/manip/conc.html [Loris, Oct 19 2011] How big are these DNA? Or are they magnified by an extra, extra thick glass? I'll bun if you explain.-- swimswim, Oct 19 2011 Yes - what do you actually see? DNA in solution will look like water. You could have a few globs floating around in ethanol, but that'll just look as if somebody sneezed (or worse) into your snowglobe.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 //store some of yours or your family members' DNA for the future//
Erm, isn't that reproduction is supposed to do?-- not_morrison_rm, Oct 19 2011 Well, I read that you could use a piece of hair or something simple as a DNA sample. I'm not a scientist, so if you want a scientific explanation...I don't really know. I'm a halfbaker!
[MB] What you see are the objects you pick to put in the snowglobe- like a double helix, floating particles, etc.
Doesn't anyone have an imagination, or should I be more specific in my description?-- xandram, Oct 19 2011 halfbakery: imagination confused-- swimswim, Oct 19 2011 //I'm not a scientist, so if you want a scientific explanation...I don't really know.//
Yeah, but, just because DNA is a cool acronym doth not an idea make. How about a snowglobe that indicates your financial liquidity? I'm not an economist but...-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 I resent that comment [MB]. I know very well what DNA is and I know what snowglobes are. I see no reason why this is not an idea. If you don't like it that's fine, but if you just don't like me, well then...-- xandram, Oct 19 2011 I think this idea is fine; it's basically a snowglobe as commonly known, but with DNA in the water, right? Only the proportions of the thing's components need some modification. If the globe and decorative pieces were microscopic, could the DNA not serve as the glitter (or whatever else is floating in traditional snowglobes)? It would need to be viewed under a microscope, but it brings christmas to the genetics lab worker, right? And it would be best if the DNA were in chromosomal bunches, so they might look like this: +-- swimswim, Oct 19 2011 [xan] it's nothing personal, it's the idea. It's just that, as posted, there's no obvious way to "present" the DNA, or make the end result look in any way different from a regular snowglobe.
Now, if you'd said something like "use ingeniously magnetized glitter bearing the letters A,C G and T, which will spontaneously assemble into a short sequence"; or "include a full diploid set of plastic chromosomes, with red bars representing harmful mutations, from both you and your partner, so that when you shake the globe you get a random segregation and can tell whether your offspring will be colourblind"; or "fill the globe with about 30% ethanol instead of water, so that the DNA precipitates to form snowflakes when put in the fridge, but redissolves in a warm room" or....
I think it just needed more more.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 What [Max] said.-- Voice, Oct 19 2011 Not all of us are so eloquent, besides I posted at 5 am, but thank you. Can I hire you to write up my ideas? At least you admitted it WAS an idea!-- xandram, Oct 19 2011 I like it as it is - decorated by yourself as a kind of time capsule. Tsk, some bakers...-- po, Oct 19 2011 //eloquent// Sp. enebriated-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 sp: inebriated.-- po, Oct 19 2011 DNA precipitated with ethanol looks a bit like clouds.
So why not call it a skyglobe or similar, and you're fine.
If you just want DNA, it's fairly easily extracted in bulk from onions.If you want it to be your own DNA - and enough to be visible - then you'll either need a larger sample than a hair follicle, or do some replication (PCR or perhaps HDA).
Either way, I don't think it would be ready within an hour.-- Loris, Oct 19 2011 A ml of blood will give you a decent glob of the stuff, enough for maybe three or four snowflake- sized snowflakes as a precipitate in ethanol.
You'd need more blood ("why, that's very nearly an armful!") to make a really dense blizzard.
Plus, you might find that precipitated DNA would glob together, giving you something that looked intermediate between a snowball and a jellyfish.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 Even taking a pinprick of blood would probably necessitate biohazard precautions. Drawing more blood than that (probably even that) would limit the market to a few non-squeamish geeks.
Much easier to take a hair follicle and copy up to what is needed - although then again, the economics of that might be a bit steep.-- Loris, Oct 19 2011 You could use one of the new isothermal random- primed kits, which basically amplify up whatever you throw in, and don't need a thermocycler. Kits run at a few dollars per sample or less, although the "real" price of the components is pence.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 There are other sources of abundant DNA which do not require bleeding, although it will reduce your client base by 50%.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 A jellyfish globe would be pretty cool. You know this is a //poorly thought out idea// as [jutta] states what the hb is...-- xandram, Oct 19 2011 //You could use one of the new isothermal random- primed kits, which basically amplify up whatever you throw in, and don't need a thermocycler.//
That's what I was thinking. Until I saw the kit price and yield. I suppose you might be able to do a deal with the manufacturer to get much larger kits suitable for the service. They'd be worried about them getting split up and sold on, though - which would totally cannibalise their business. Could try selling it to them as a PR exercise I suppose.-- Loris, Oct 19 2011 [MB] //50%// Not in China.-- mouseposture, Oct 19 2011 If you bought the ingredients rather than the kit, and particularly if you bought the polymerase from some dodgy supplier, you could do it for pence per person - maybe a dollar at most.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 Get a mosquito to bite you and then encase it in amber. Future scientists will then clone and exhibit you.-- marklar, Oct 19 2011 Well, no two people are genetically identical (and yes, that includes identical twins). In fact, no two cells in your body have the same genome, but don't tell everyone or the money will fall right out of 'genomic medicine'.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 19 2011 //If you bought the ingredients rather than the kit, and particularly if you bought the polymerase from some dodgy supplier, you could do it for pence per person - maybe a dollar at most.//
Polymerase, helicase, dNTPs ... how much DNA do we want again?
//In fact, no two cells in your body have the same genome//
Human (diploid) genome : ~=6 billion bp = 6,000,000,000
Mammalian error rate : ~10^-8 per bp.
Average number of errors per genome replication (product of above two numbers) : 60
Number of cells in human body (order of magnitude) : 10^14
Poission distribution with above values:
f(0;60)=60^0 x e^(-60) / 0! = e^(-60) = 8.76 x 10^-27
so naively you might be right.
However, your imprecise wording makes me still want to try and take you up on that as a bet.-- Loris, Oct 20 2011 Your mammalian error rate is the wrong one. By far the commonest changes are copy-number changes (loss or gain of segments). Huge swathes of cells have extra (or missing) chunks of genome. Not only that but (I predict) some of these inter-cell, intra- organismal changes will be regulatory in nature (eg, the best way to shut down a gene for good is to just lose it).-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 20 2011 //Your mammalian error rate is the wrong one.//
Doesn't matter - it still comes out as extremely unlikely that any pair of daughter cells are identical in a human organism.
//By far the commonest changes are copy-number changes (loss or gain of segments). Huge swathes of cells have extra (or missing) chunks of genome. Not only that but (I predict) some of these inter-cell, intra- organismal changes will be regulatory in nature (eg, the best way to shut down a gene for good is to just lose it).//
Absolutely. Human red blood cells are anucleate and mitochondrea-free, so they all have the same genetic content (absolutely none at all; a 'null' genome). This is why I'd win the bet.
Out of interest, what sort of error rate are we talking for chromosomal mis-assignment or indels in mitosis?
And regarding intra-organism regulation by genetic rearrangement, I only know of the immune system in 'higher' eukaryotes. In prokaryotes and small eukaryotes on the other hand, I know of quite a few such systems ranging from simple switches to the really quite involved (such as how the malaria parasite evades the immune system). There's also a beautiful mechanism for detecting plasmid dimers, and a mechanism by which transposons direct reintegration. So there are basically two themes: generation of diversity, and detection of genome structure.
I do vaguely remember that some small multicellular organisms delete parts of their genome in certain specific cells, so that may happen in humans, although I haven't heard of it specifically (besides complete annucleation as in red blood cells, of course). I'd be really quite interested if you could say more about that.-- Loris, Oct 20 2011 //what sort of error rate are we talking for chromosomal mis-assignment or indels in mitosis//
I don't think anyone knows, really, because almost all of genomics is based on the assumption that all the cells in one person are clonal, and that their white blood cells are the same as any other (apart from some fancy stuff going on in immunoglobulin genes). I'm talking here about copy-number changes involving segments of chromosomes, not aneuploidies which involve extra or missing whole chromosomes, although somatic aneuploidies are known and are probably commoner than believed.
One guy looked at genomic differences between different tissues of the same (dead) person; in each of several people, he found copy-number differences between different tissues. Each tissue sample consisted of many thousands of cells, so it's likely that he only saw differences which arose in the first few cell divisions during development and hence affected large subpopulations of cells; later changes would affect only a smaller number of cells and would have been averaged out in his samples. If we assume that such events occur equally in all mitoses, then it's very unlikely that any cell in an adult retains the original genome, even without the point-mutation errors you alluded to.
People have done other stuff, such as comparing identical twins (again, they find differences), but it's really only beginning to dawn on people that this variation is significant and abundant.
My guess is that (a) some genomic changes will be programmed (cells use every other trick to regulate genes) and (b) a fair proportion of diseases will turn out to be due to these somatic copy-number changes.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 20 2011 Just reading the title, before I even opened the post, gave me the mental image of a snowglobe filled with flakes of dead skin. Thanks for that.-- Alterother, Oct 20 2011 You're thinking of the Dandruff Snowglobe. Also DIY.-- swimswim, Oct 20 2011 // Dandruff Snowglobe //
What does [21 Quest]'s head have to do with this?-- Alterother, Oct 20 2011 random, halfbakery