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hi i i'm almost there i'm just i'm stuck

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in the most ridiculous traffic

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all right i'll be there real soon don't

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worry we won't be late i promise i'll be

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there real soon i'll pick you guys up on

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[Music]

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oh sarah

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aaron guys i'm sorry traffic was insane

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understood come on in

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so i heard you guys are working on the

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biomolecule sequencer now

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i mean what the heck is that it sounds

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like something off of a superheroes

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utility belt or something

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yeah well basically um there's a little

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portable sequencer you know that we

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happen to bring with us we're basically

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just trying to make it so you can

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sequence dna anywhere whether that's in

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a rover going to the meeting or

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on the planet mars or on the

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international space station

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sequencing dna real quick high school

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science question what does dna stand for

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dna is deoxyribonucleic acid

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and it's basically the molecule where

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cells contain all the instructions for

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life so every everything that a that a

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cell needs to do every function is

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contained in its dna

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can you spell that

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uh space acid acid

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color me impress

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all right so

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sarah sequencing dna what is what does

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that mean like what are you what are you

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guys

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doing with that so every organism has as

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aaron said this dna and it's the

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sequence of the a's g's t's and c's or

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the dna bases that make us up and make

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up our cells and encode all of the

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things we need to live so by sequencing

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it we're determining that order of the

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nucleotide bases to figure out what

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organisms are in our sample and things

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like that that we can use to gain more

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information about biological life so

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basically you take this dna and by

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reading those different letters i

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already forgot them you can figure out

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you know what something is so you can

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take an unknown sample and figure out

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what it is

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that's correct okay

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why i mean why why do we need to do

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something like that well if there's a

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contaminating

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fungus that's on the iss we want to know

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what it is so we can best recommend how

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to clean it up and right now we don't

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have a way to do that on the iss so it

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would be cool if we could take

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real samples from the iss we could

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figure out all the different microbes

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that are in them so we can use it to

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find out if stuff's growing in a space

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station but

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you just said you can use it to like

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find life we can use this to find life

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outside of earth possibly yeah so we

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have mars meteorites on earth which

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means that little pieces of mars have

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been impacted and then flown through

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space and landed on the earth and so

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it's very possible that pieces of early

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earth

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got released and made their way out to

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mars so the most likely candidate

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to have life

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uh is mars and it could have life that

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started on earth

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or life on earth could have started on

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mars and so if there is a common uh

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ancestry then we could be able to detect

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it with a sequencer like this

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you mean we haven't already found aliens

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uh we have not no

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[Music]

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hey aaron you want to sequence some dna

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in a rover

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so you can do it like right here like

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that's it yeah it's exactly small

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that's insane okay so what like what's

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actually happening so i have a sample

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here that contains dna from a mouse a

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virus and a bacteria it's the same

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samples that are on the iss that have

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been sequenced

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and i'm injecting them

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into this miniature dna sequencer

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and we are actually going to start

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collecting the sequences while we're

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roving around this has never been done

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in a rover before correct i think it's

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safe to say never been done in a row

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there you go

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breaking new ground here

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nothing is so small like what what magic

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is happening now

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um so in this little window here there's

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a bunch of what are called nanopores so

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they're biological

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proteins that exist in normal cells and

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they allow ions to flow through and it's

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just big enough to let a single strand

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of dna actually pass through the pore

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when there's nothing in the pore you get

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a certain fixed current

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and then as dna passes through it the

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pore gets blocked and the current is

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reduced and so it's that change in

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current that tells you what the sequence

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of dna flowing through it is so you guys

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so let's say i'm on a space station or

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i'm on the surface of mars i scoop up a

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sample

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i put it in there and that thing can

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actually tell me what it is

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that's the idea there's a few more steps

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in there

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so you have to extract cells from the

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dirt

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then you have to get the dna out of the

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cells and then do a little bit of uh

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library preparation

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but there's a number of teams and people

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that are working on ways to have either

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robots do that or to make it really easy

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for humans to do it so we got the

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sequencer in here with us is that one

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has that one been used before have you

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have you used it anywhere as cool as the

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rover yet

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almost as cool this one was used in the

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aquarius habitat as part of the nemo

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mission that's about 62 feet at the

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bottom of the ocean off the coast of key

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largo florida oh wow so we uh had the

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aquanauts last july collect samples from

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their habitat prepare those samples for

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sequencing and then sequence what they

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found all right so we've sequenced dna

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underwater we've now done it in a rover

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but this thing's in space right now like

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how has it been working in space from

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what we could tell so far it's working

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even better in space

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so we've really exceeded our wildest

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expectations we actually had a pretty

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big milestone the other day where we

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passed our billionth base of dna

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sequencing space billion with a b yes

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billion with a b

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so the human genome is about three

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billion base pairs um and so for us to

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get a billion

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uh bases in space really gets us on that

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same scale which is pretty amazing

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all right we're here we made it to the

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meeting guys thanks so much for driving

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along with me makes it drive a whole lot

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more fun and awesome project can't wait

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to see more yeah thank you all right

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well we got our dna sequences so we're

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going to go analyze awesome all right

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[Music]