Folding a Fitted Sheet; God’s Design and Pumpkin DNA

We had a super-fun opportunity this week (recommended to me by a friend who is interning at the Los Alamos STEAM Lab) to use our old half-eaten pumpkins for a science experiment--we were going to isolate some pumpkin DNA! 

God put DNA is in every plant and animal--we literally eat it at every meal! You can extract bits of DNA, made up of billions of little units (called "bases," which are abbreviated as A, C, T, and G) in your kitchen with some common household items! 

Fun fact: while humans have about 3 billion bases in their DNA, the garden onion has about 15 billion bases! if the DNA from a single human cell was stretched out, it would be about six feet long. Think how long am onion DNA strand would be!

 Every living cell (that we know of) contains DNA. You can think of it as a recipe book with information for building and running the organism--so obviously, every different organism needs different information, so the DNA will vary with every individual. 

If you do this experiment, the DNA may look like a messy glob, but in the cell, DNA is neatly stored in the nucleus, folded up many, many times so it will fit--I picture an extremely large and complicated fitted sheet that God had no trouble folding. That really puts his omnipotence in perspective as a mom, amiright?!?! The way it's folded, any segment can be accesses and utilized by the cell as it is needed. 

If you think of DNA like a book (or maybe a scroll?) and the bases A, C, T, and G form words, that's our genes! Genes contain all kinds of info that living things need, and as we learn more about DNA, it makes me appreciate the goodness and the wisdom of the Author of life, God--He created DNA to provide information necessary for our development...and the the development of pumpkins, onions, cats, dogs, and everything else! 

See those goopy floating things? That’s the DNA strands! 

Check out the Facebook of Los Alamos STEAM Lab's video to isolate pumpkin DNA here.

Check out Answers in Genesis article with instructions to isolate onion DNA here. 

This article, with alterations, originally appeared on the Home School Corner of cbcwm.blogspot.com