Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life of DNA is 521 Years, Jurassic Park Impossible After All
another random user writes with this quote from Nature News:
"Few researchers have given credence to claims that samples of dinosaur DNA have survived to the present day, but no one knew just how long it would take for genetic material to fall apart. Now, a study of fossils found in New Zealand is laying the matter to rest — and putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex (abstract). After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate. Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process. By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on."
Russian and Korean Researchers Will Inject Mammoth DNA Into Elephant Eggs, Resurrecting 10,000-Year-Old Beast
Quick, what does this mean regarding mammoth burgers?
Does this have any bearing on cryogenics or would that preserve the DNA?
...for God's sake, lets get samples and clone Keith Richards before its too late!?!?!?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It is an English phrase meaning 'putting an end to' but using fewer words.
Korma: Good
So in amber, or some other similar impermeable substance, the chemical reactions requiring water or air might well be prevented or dramatically slowed, thus the degradation of DNA might be substantially slower than the 521 years described in the summary.
Not necessarily the end of the Jurassic Park idea.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
If the half-life of DNA is 521 years how are scientists able to sequence 30.000 year old Neanderthal DNA? Presumably this applies to regular DNA, did Svante Pääbo and his team sequence mtDNA?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Wikipedia seems to have a page all about doing what this article says is impossible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA
It claims there are multiple cases of Neanderthal DNA being sequenced, and a couple quick google searches seem to indicate there are many other similar situations where DNA was recovered.
So i'm wondering, did this study perhaps prove that if nothing is done to preserve the DNA after death then... surprise! The DNA isn't preserved?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The 521 year half-life is if the DNA is exposed to water in typical situations, ITFA (in the article) they give an estimate for the best case situation...
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
As other posters point out, the famous mammoth recreated from DNA was from about 10,000 years ago, much less than the 1.5 million year practical limit estimated by this research team.
If you don't pay for your putting, you can't have any meat. How can you have any meat if you don't pay for your putting?
Is this why we haven't heard much from Mary Schwietzer lately? Six years ago she isolated soft tissue remnants from inside a T-rex femur.
More recently, Charlotte Oskam (Biologist at Murdoch University in Australia) identified DNA in fossilized egg shells.
We've always known that DNA was unlikely to survive the passage of aeons, this just puts a number to it. Specific conditions could still allow better than typical preservation, and so I dislike making an absolute statement that we'll never find it. Hopefully those who are still looking for the elusive ancient DNA will take this study as a way to focus their search rather than have their funding cut.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
But we're going to explain to you how half-lives work anyways.
moox. for a new generation.
I wonder if 521 years is how long we'll be waiting for Half Life 3?
Welcome to Dodo Park.
Sorry, it just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
If the dinosaur is encased in amber, why do we need to wait for a mosquito? Why would we want to wait for a mosquito that can bite through amber... drill the thing then get the hell out of there.
Even given the half life, we may be able to resurrect dinosaurs. Remember that we are talking about information that is encoded, with billions of copies hanging around. Given we can find enough samples, even if they are all missing different portions, we may be able to piece together the complete sequence by combining the portions of each sample that survived. Throw in extremely cold temperatures like the article talks about, and some Jurassic-park style replacement of certain portions from modern animals, and it is still very possible. Maybe not today, but in 100 years I can see it being very possible.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
A mosquito that bit a dinosaur encased in amber....
Forget that. I'd like to see the tree that generated the sap to encase a dinosaur in amber. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
One of the best ways to make it happen is to declare it's "impossible". It gives people something to strive for.
OK. I just showed my computer a picture of a Komodo Dragon. It just is sitting there, doing nothing.
Now what am I supposed to do?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why is the parent modded 'Funny' - that is the story behind how the scientists in Jurassic Park found dinosaur DNA...
You just explained why it's funny.
which is totally what she said
He meant frogs not "frog's". Dino DNA is of course really large (Were talking a T-Rex afterall), so all they have to do is inject a whole frog directly in sequence. AAAATSAATTTTS(frog)AAA
The half-life of unusual British phrases in the US is less than 18 years.
the assumptions in the 521 year half life number is that we are above freezing temperatures. so mammoth DNA has a different experience
there are arguments to make that frozen water would lengthen the half life (frozen water is not as chemically active) or shorten it (ice crystals shredding the dna physically rather than chemically)
i'm not knowledgeable enough to guess if the frozen effect would save the DNA better or shred it even worse, but i think it is a valid to say that the half life would be a lot different if you are dealing with a corpse that was frozen at death and stayed that way in permafrost the entire thousands of years time before getting to a modern biotech lab
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's 98% chicken DNA,
With 2% Samuel Jackson mixed in to make it a Bad Ass Mother Fucker.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra