Posted by wibble1:
I agree! The buccal swab has an ejectable head and you can extract the person's DNA from their saliva on the swab. Cool or what? I actuaaly did this experiment at Uni a few months ago for my Biology degree - I was given a cotton bud in a salt solution and had to scrape it round my mouth for a while to get some cheek cells on the swab which made the salt solution go all milky. We then extracted the DNA in the lab and ran the DNA on a gel. The bands of my DNA were stauned and photographed under a microscope and voila! I have picture of my DS180 chromosome bands (I'm heterozygote for this chromosome as I have two distinct bands)
Sorry - completely off topic there for a bit...err, anyway, I think it's Selina's turn