LED DNA Model

This awesome Instructable was built by my daughter for her advanced biology class in high school.  Admit it, ever since you saw pretty LEDs you have thought about building a DNA model.  Well here are the instructions for just that.   This is not just your basic double helix model, this model consists of several DNA pairs, representations of enzyme molecules and shows how DNA splits and replicates.  My daughter does not mess around when it comes to her schoolwork!

Now you might say that she cheated and just had me just show her everything to do, but she did not.  I helped her breadboard the initial LEDs so she could see how they work and I showed her how to solder a DNA pair.  After that, armed with a soldering iron, off she went.  She put this together on a Sunday afternoon.

Step 1 Gather your parts...

You will need:

• 9 Volt battery and battery holder - I had one with a switch built in. 
• Lots of 100 Ohm resistors, buy 1 per DNA pair.  Go ahead and buy a hundred, they are cheap.
• Breadboard for testing
• Soldering Iron and solder
• Helping hands or duct tape to assist with the holding of the pieces to be soldered.
• Green LEDs - When buying LEDs, get the 5mm ones - I bought many various colors and we tested a bunch of different color combos
• Red LEDs - twice as many Red LEDs than the Green ones
• Blue LEDs
• Yellow LEDs - twice as many Yellow LEDs than the Blue ones
• Romex Electrical wire (12 Gauge) - Home Depot or Lowes
• Electrical Tape
• Big Capacitors
• 2 bigger (physical size) 100 Ohm resistors - to represent the Helicase molecule
• Piece of wood for the base

You can get resistors, capacitors, breadboards, battery holders, etc from Jameco.  The LEDs I bought are from superbrightleds.com out of St. Louis.  You can buy cheaper LEDs from China (ebay)  if you have time to wait for shipping.  Still, I like to buy American when I can.

Comments

[husamwadi]

Very nice! I'm in ap bio and making a led dna strand completely slipped my mind!

Im going to make one of these for my class and when the teacher asks if i thought of this idea all by myself I'll point to the copyright at the bottom:

"Sarah Wagner ©"

Thanks for the idea