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If this life is DNA based they just need a PCR (+) and sequencing, to see if it is from Earth. Does anyone have a link that discuss if they tried that? (Edit: L

• sndean 11y ago
  Yeah, in one of his papers [1] they did a DAPI stain and said it was positive for DNA. They really need to do sequencing. It's cheap enough to do sequencing of microbes now that some lab could simply offer to do it without funding. Ignoring the idea of "alien life", whatever they find out would be interesting. Craig Venter sequenced the ocean, Wainwright should do the stratosphere. [1] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21672857.2015.1087751 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21672857.2015.10...
  • astrodust 11y ago
    "We've done tests and it's human, and apparently...our lab technician." Wasn't there a case of a lady being implicated in thousands of crimes based on DNA evidence because of contaminating the samples she was working with?
    • sndean 11y ago
      There's a lot of stories like that caused by sloppiness. If you blast (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE_TYPE=BlastSearch https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE_TYPE=BlastSear...) the sequence of essentially every organism with a sequenced genome, you'll find long stretches of the human genome. Even worse are the genomes coming out of one specific lab... there are always stretches of the Chlamydia genome. I wonder if that tech knows?
• cbd1984 11y ago
  But if they did that, they might find that it's either not alien or not life at all!