Wednesday, March 19, 2008

DNA lego model

Inspired by the simple DNA model by Eric Harshbarger (http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/mini_dna.html), I decided to build one with my daughter. This is also to prepare for the upcoming "Bring your daughters and sons to work day".

Because of the simpleness, Eric's model can not demonstrate the difference between G-C and A-T pairs. This is a major complain that my wife had who is also a biologist. That triggered me to build a more complicated DNA model. While preserve the beauty of Eric's model, I wanted more information to be added. After tried and errors to about 2:00am. I thought one solution. Here it is. The middle one is what I built. The right one is Eric's model. My one is bigger. It has more room between double helix. So I can put three or two hydrogen bonds in.





My mother also got involve. I found one site talk about knitting. She followed the instruction and knitted one.



Some models created by Affymetrix Chips







Some pictures of a model made by Illumina Genechips and Lego