Iced Biscuits

The Saturday Museum | Digital Image | #flowcellular

Ingredients
Bourbon biscuits
Custard Creams
Icing sugar
Grapes
Nuts
Maltesers

Equipment
Chopping board, icing gun

Method
Line up a sequence of Bourbons and Custard Creams (DNA bases). Each biscuit has two layers (strands of DNA). They are correctly paired and in the right order – this is important as the order provides the information for your body to make proteins, the building blocks of cells. Take an icing gun and add nuts, grapes and Maltesers to the top of three of the biscuits. This is what can happen when unwanted substances can attach to your DNA – changing its shape.

To remove these, separate the two halves of the Bourbon or Custard Cream and replace with another normal half from the same type of biscuit. The sequence is restored to its original state and the pattern is complete. Alternatively, you can replace with another half of a different variety of biscuit or replace the whole section with a different biscuit entirely. Even small errors in the sequence can cause things to go awry.

Take a Bourbon and add a line of icing around the edge – the two halves are now fused together representing interstrand links caused by chemotherapy drugs. They can’t separate, causing breaks in the strands and leading to parts of the sequence being shuffled or deleted, stopping it from making sense.

In this experiment Ellie, Aless, Ana and Charli were exploring the different types of mutations that can occur to our genes and how chemotherapy drugs can cause changes to our DNA. They also discussed the future of food, their preconceptions about ageing, the importance of curiosity, organoids, the value of mistakes and when repair works and doesn’t work.