Genetic Ancestry: Discover Your Maternal Lineage Through DNA

In this workshop, you’ll extract and analyze your own mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to explore your genetic ancestry. Over the course of this experiment, you’ll uncover how your DNA connects you to maternal haplogroups and distant human populations.

You’ll isolate mtDNA from your own cheek cells, amplify a region of the mtDNA using polymers chain reaction (PCR), visualize your DNA with gel electrophoresis, and sequence it using Sanger sequencing. Finally, you’ll use bioinformatics tools to align your data, determine your maternal haplogroup, and construct a phylogenetic tree of relatedness with your classmates and other global populations.

What You’ll Learn and Do:

• Extract DNA from your cheek cells
• Perform PCR to amplify your mtDNA
• Run agarose gel electrophoresis to confirm your results
• Sequence your DNA using Sanger sequencing
• Use bioinformatics tools like BLAST to analyze your mtDNA
• Discover your maternal haplogroup and compare it with others

No prior lab or coding experience is necessary, just curiosity!

COVID-19 Safety Notice:

If you are feeling unwell, suspect that you have been exposed to COVID-19 or have tested positive in the past 7 days, please do not attend and let us know ASAP (aW5mbyB8IGdlbnNwYWNlICEgb3Jn). If you cancel after our 7-day policy, we cannot refund your ticket, but we can exchange and offer credits toward future classes. If you have signed up for Biohacker Boot Camp, we will automatically transfer your registration to the next month’s dates unless you tell us otherwise.

Kenny Bradley (he/they) is a graduate student at Rockefeller University, where they are working towards their Master's degree in Neuroscience. They attended Brown University for undergrad where they studied biology and worked in a Drosophila lab researching Mitochondrial DNA. They currently study neuron and glial cell development in C. Elegans. Outside of lab they are a poet who utilizes concepts in both music and biology to influence and shape their writing to discuss topics ranging in self-love, identity, dissecting trauma, and being a black person in STEM. Alot of their current pursuits attempt to combine, science education and writing, to show the interplay between science and art while making the field more accessible to the public. When they're not in the lab or writing, you can find him in a record store, steaming fresh cup of hot chocolate in hand, Spotify in the other as he researches new artists to introduce to his homies.

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