Today is our big day: Our first visit to the Deutsche Museum. We stayed here the whole day to learn two lessons. One was Genetic Fingerprinting Course, which was about DNA science, and the other was scanning tunneling microscope(STM), which naturally falls under the are of Nanotechnology. We divided into two groups, learning each lesson by turns. I was excited to start with Genetic Fingerprinting Course.
Our instructor told us what would we learn and the background of the murder case that we needed to solve as a starter. The information we had were the murder's DNA and other four suspects' DNA too. The experiment was to replicate DNA, then we could use gel electrophoresis to separate and find out which suspect's DNA had the same feature as the murderer's DNA. The first step was putting the master mix, which contained primer, polymerase, and nucleotides, with one DNA template together. We had to compound five solutions because we had five templates. Then we put all of the solutions into a thermal cycler to start the PCR reaction. An hour later, we completed the DNA amplification. As we got enough DNA samples, we analyzed them by the gel electrophoresis and dye the whole gel(which touched like a jelly) in blue color. After that, we saw many lanes come from wells. We found that one of the lanes had showed same features of bands with the sample of the murder’s DNA. It meant this suspect was the real murderer in the accident. We went to the nanometre lab in the afternoon. At the beginning, the instructor showed us the examples of the nanotechnology in nature world. We learned the gecko's feet, lotus effect and its application, and the science in nano-particle of silicon dioxide. Our instructor used questions to guide us thinking and answering by ourselves. It let us learn a lot from this process. After we learned about the nanotechnology, we started to do a worksheet to experience the employment of STM. We got a paper that showed us a picture which was taken from the STM screen, then we had to find out what it was. At first, we should measure the length of the picture to calculate scale. We also needed to measure the distance between several atoms in three directions to get enough data. Second, we used these data to calculate the atomic distance, changing it into the real distance with the scale. Third, we compared the atomic distance that we calculated with four possible substances.
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February 2018
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