A genetics lab is a busy, noisy place.
It's full of equipment and supplies and researchers toiling away at their workstations (called lab benches, even though the bench is really just a raised, flat surface that's conducive to working while standing up).
Depending on the lab, you may see people looking very official in white lab coats or researchers dressed more casually in jeans and T-shirts.
Every lab contains some or all of the following:
✓ Disposable gloves to protect workers from chemical exposure and to protect DNA and other materials from contamination.
✓ Pipettes (for measuring even the tiniest droplets of liquids with extreme accuracy), glassware (for liquid measurement and storage), and vials and tubes (for chemical reactions).
✓ Electronic balances for making super-precise measurements of mass.
✓ Chemicals and ultrapure water.
✓ A refrigerator (set at 40 degrees Fahrenheit), a freezer (at -4 degrees),
and an ultracold freezer (at -112 degrees) for storing samples.
Repeated freezing and thawing causes DNA to break into tiny pieces, which destroys it. For that reason, freezers used in genetics labs aren't frost-free, because the temperature inside a frost-free freezer cycles up and down to melt any ice that forms.
✓ Centrifuges for separating substances from each other. Given that different substances have different densities, centrifuges spin at extremely high speeds to force materials to separate so that researchers can handle them individually.
✓ Incubators for growing bacteria under controlled conditions. Researchers often use bacteria for experimental tests of how genes work.
✓ Autoclaves for sterilizing glassware and other equipment using extreme heat and pressure to kill bacteria and viruses.
✓ Complex pieces of equipment such as thermocyclers and DNA sequencers.
✓ Lab notebooks for recording every step of every reaction or experiment in nauseating detail. Geneticists must fully replicate (run over and over) every experiment to make sure the results are valid. The lab notebook is also a legal document that can be used in court cases, so precision and completeness are musts.
✓ Desktop computers packed with software for analyzing results and for connecting via the Internet to vast databases packed with genetic information (flip to the end of this chapter for the addresses of some useful Web sites).
Researchers in the lab use the various pieces of equipment and supplies from the preceding list to conduct experiments and run chemical reactions. Some of the common activities that occur in the genetics lab include
✓ Separating DNA from the rest of a cell's contents.
✓ Measuring the purity of a DNA sample and determining how much DNA
(by weight) is present.
✓ Mixing chemicals that are used in reactions and experiments designed
to analyze DNA samples.
✓ Growing special strains of bacteria and viruses to aid in examining short
stretches of DNA.
✓ Using DNA sequencing to learn the order of bases that compose a DNA strand.
✓ Setting up polymerase chain reactions, or PCR, a powerful process that allows scientists to analyze even very tiny amounts of DNA.
✓ Analyzing the results of DNA sequencing by comparing sequences from many different organisms (you can find this information in a massive, publicly available database - see the end of this chapter).
✓ Comparing DNA fingerprints from several individuals to identify perpetrators or to assign paternity.
✓ Holding weekly or daily meetings where everyone in the lab comes together to discuss results or plan new experiments.
YOU ARE READING
Genetics
Short StoryMy goal is to explain every topic so that anyone, even someone without any genetics background at all, can follow the subject and understand how it works. As in the first, I include many examples from the frontiers of research. I also make sure that...
