week 3: tasty dna

Interested in sampling some DNA? Putting aside the fact that you do it all the time (most of the food we eat has it), with this project, you can build your own tasty model of your favorite molecule!

Materials: 

• Toothpicks
  
• Gumdrops (or some sort of soft, small candies that come in 4 different colors. Examples include Dots, gummy bears, etc.) 
  
• Twizzlers (or some sort of rope-like candy)
  

Directions:

1. Sort your gumdrops into piles of four different colors. Decide which color will be which nucleotide -- we have adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. Remember that adenine can only pair with thymine and cytosine can only pair with guanine. That means that you need to keep track on which color pairs you string along on your toothpicks.
   
2. Connect two Twizzlers with toothpicks, so that you have a shape resembling a ladder. This will be the backbone of the DNA, and will be twisted into a double helix shape later on.
   
3.  Add your nucleotide pairs onto your toothpicks! You can add any pairs in any order (after all, DNA is unique!) but make sure to keep the pairs accurate.
   
4. Twist your 'ladder' shape into a double helix!
   

What's Going On?
DNA is a very important molecule in your body! It stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, and it contains crucial genetic information about you! DNA tells your cells what to do: for example, it tells your hair, eye, and skin color. 
The shape of DNA is a double helix: this is the twisty shape that it holds, and the reason that you twisted your 'ladder' of Twizzlers.
The gumdrops that you paired represent nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. As we mentioned above, there are 4 nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. Adenine can only pair with thymine and cytosine can only pair with guanine, and they can also be written by their first letters. Adenine is A, thymine is T, cytosine is C, and guanine is G. Try writing the base pairs of your DNA model on a piece of paper, using the letters above!

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