Slashdot Mirror
Ancient Cave Bear DNA Extracted and Decoded
diamond writes "The BBC reports that 'scientists have extracted and decoded the DNA of a cave bear that died 40,000 years ago.' The sequencing technique could also work for Neanderthals. However, 'the idea of obtaining DNA from dinosaurs, depicted in the film Jurassic Park, remains science fiction.' Also reported by Nature Magazine."
Here's a couple updates on that.
BytesTemplar.com
DNA is not the most stable of molecules, and actually breaks down rather easily. After periods as long as the time between the dinosaurs and now, the DNA has degraded a great deal and all that would remain are small fragments of DNA. Currently, there is no way to combine these fragments even if we were somehow able to obtain enough to creat a whol strand of DNA. Thus it is science fiction still.
The researchers retrieved very many fragments of DNA from their fossils. By comparing the fragments to references for bears and dogs (which are 93% bear, apparently), and excluding human and bacterial sequences, they were able to identify a number of distinctly cave bear fragments. In total this amounts to 26,861 base pairs which was enough to place it within its proper lineage with respect to other bears.
Of course, compared to the 2.3 billion base pairs in a human, they have a rather long way to go before being able to build a meaningful genome. Still, given that this kind of fossilized DNA has never been recovered before, it is a good first step.
There may be hundreds of thousands of types of biomolecules in your average cell. DNA is one of the less stable among them. Finding the more stable molecules isn't that big of a deal; it's the less stable ones that we want.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
I never heard any follow-up though.