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Is it reasonable to conclude that no animal that has gone extinct in the last millennium should be unsequencible, given a modest amount of genetic material?
by xbar 5y ago
Is it reasonable to conclude that no animal that has gone extinct in the last millennium should be unsequencible, given a modest amount of genetic material?
- dekhn 5y agoNo. Mammoth DNA has been sequenced (15K years old). Perfect conditions for preserving tissue, small fragments can be extracted. Since all cells have the same DNA, fragments that are long enough and have low enough base error rates can be aligned to reconstruct longer fragments (really the same thing as regular shotgun genome assembly). I would expect if you could find ancient (1Mya) tardigrades preserved as tuns, they could probably be extracted and sequenced.