M. Møhl
Posted on 10/10/2012 8:32:08 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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.
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...
"I am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves," says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Moreover, the researchers found that age differences accounted for only 38.6% of the variation in DNA degradation between moa-bone samples. "Other factors that impact on DNA preservation are clearly at work," says Bunce. "Storage following excavation, soil chemistry and even the time of year when the animal died are all likely contributing factors that will need looking into."
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
M. Møhl
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield. |
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Or are we are the start of that hunt?
/johnny
Dinosaurs, humans, and everything else, are less than 10,000 years old. If you don’t agree I pray for your soul.
I’ll pray for your brain.
Go study your Bible and get back to me when you understand it. All you are supposed to know is there.
But now, if this research is accurate, if we found viable dinosaur DNA, I imagine that would have people scratching their head. Because it shouldn't be possible -- but what if we find it?
The Bible isn’t the literal truth, it tells truths.
I have a zero tolerance policy for relativism. Please, elaborate on the assumptions you use to determine which of God’s words are truth, and which are open to being part of an interpretation of truth.
Thanks.
Is DNA damage (and lack of repair) what causes aging?
God didn’t write the Bible, men did.
How do I build a computer chip?
You know, the Muslims say the exact same thing.
It’s in Leviticus I think.
Yeah.... but God wrote the Ten Commandments. It even says so in the Bible. And he had to do it twice, because we are such idiots.
God authored the Bible, man only wrote it down.
God authored the Bible, man only wrote it down.
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