January 2014 – Fruit Forensics

Kids at the Urbana Free Library helped unravel a murder mystery to determine who squashed the banana. They extracted DNA from bananas, strawberries, kiwis, and grapes, then mapped the associated profiles onto a pseudo-gel. The patterns were compared to identify the culprit, and happy youths went homeward with a keepsake necklace full of DNA. Another fruit folly figured out with fantastically fun forensics.