Candy Electrophoresis Lab

Today, we extracted food dye from different candies and compared them to commonly used artificial food dyes. I know candy is bad for you, but c'mon, how bad is chocolates and sweets? We read how "foods were colored with substances that were not safe to consume, such as bread whitened with chalk or cheese made yellow by lead tetroxide". We tested orange skittles, yellow reese's pieces, green mike and ikes, and blue M&M. You can say our lab was "sweet" success *crickets*, not really, but I'll get to that later.

We were given focus questions to answer about today's experiment.
1. Stated above, we have four different colors; orange, yellow, green, and blue. The reference dyes that our teacher provided, did not have a reference for our green candy dye. Also, we left the gel in the electrophoresis chamber (which you can read about in my previous post) for over 40 minutes, when it instructed for 15 minutes. The dyes "ran" off the end of the gel instead of staying within the gel. The colors that were somewhat visible were at the same length as their counterpart.

2. The Blue 1 dye is the same structure as Fast Green FCF dye and the Red 40 and Citrus red 2 have a similar structure. They would migrate similarly because of the same amount of DNA fragments.

3. Dog food manufacturers put artificial food colors in dog food to improve the appearance. If it looked disgusting and foul, no dog owner would want to feed it to their babies.

4. The two factors that control the distance the colored dye solutions migrate were how long we leave the gel in the chamber, which for us was way too long, and how concentrated the candy solution was.

Our failed result 
5. The force that helped the dyes move across the gel was electricity (AGAIN, for more information on gel electrophoresis, read my previous post).

6. They use electricity to separate the DNA fragments based on the size of the fragment. If it was a smaller piece, it would travel faster than a long band.

7. The heavier weighted DNA molecules would be travel less because of their size, and the lighter molecules would glide through the gel easier.



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