Hmmmmm.... Well the reason this may be difficult is the "readable" part of your question.
I'm not exactly sure what it is you're trying to test. You want to know whether different conditions degrade the DNA enough that it couldn't be recognized by a polymerase or something?
To do these types of experiments you'd need access to the equipment necessary to assess the state of the DNA. There are a few ways to test it that I can think of...
1) DNA sequencing. Most universities and companies that do this type of work have core DNA sequencing facilities that could sequence your DNA for you for a small fee. You'd need sequence primers but only a small amount of DNA for each sequence. This method would be the most accurate in determining how damaged the DNA is.
2) PCR. You could some primers to a known portion of DNA within the plasmid and see if you get a PCR product. This won't tell you the sequence of the DNA but if you don't get a product you can be fairly sure that there were some major changes in the DNA.
3) Agarose gel. This would be the cheapest and least informative way of all and maybe in combination with the PCR method you'd get the most info for your buck. If you simply run a small amount of DNA in an agarose gel you can visualize the DNA ( the DNA bands). Plasmid DNA runs in a fairly consistent manner. If the DNA is degraded or bad a lot of times you'll get more of a smear then the tight banding pattern you'd expect.
If I were you I'd also come up with several conditions to try and "effect the DNA". Remember that DNA is one of the most stable biological molecules out there. It can survive freezing for sure (that's how I store mine
) but can also survive high heat (it denatures above 90 degrees centigrade) and will tolerate many freeze/thaw cycles, alcohol, anti-freeze, many different chemicals do nothing to DNA. It can be dried down and resuspended all with very little damage to the actual DNA sequence.
So if I were you I'd find a really good positive control ( a condition that you know will screw up your DNA). DNAse enzyme (an enzyme that chews apart DNA) is available and is fairly cheap and a tiny amount of it will destroy your DNA for sure.
I don't exactly know the context of this project (I'm assuming high school?) so I have no idea what resources you have at your disposal but if you have plasmid DNA I bet you've done work with agarose gels before.
Good luck and you can email me if you have questions.
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