3 ms·
> DNA half life is around 500 years. After a million years, it would have degraded so bad you literally have nothing left to reconstruct no matter how much samp
by credit_guy 3y ago
> DNA half life is around 500 years. After a million years, it would have degraded so bad you literally have nothing left to reconstruct no matter how much sample you discover.
That article with the 521 half life of DNA was complete bull. In 2022 they found DNA from a 2 million year old mastodon [1].
The whole 521 year half life is something like "it was that in our sample, and we can't guarantee that the result generalizes". Good maybe for a high school science project, not good for a paper in Nature.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04376-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04376-y
- lifthrasiir 3y agoThe half-life of 521 years does allow for some million year old DNAs to be found. The original paper even noted this possibility in exceptionally good environments [1, section 4]: > Our results indicate that short fragments of DNA could be present for a very long time; at –5°C, the model predicts a half-life of 158 000 years for a 30 bp mtDNA fragment in bone. Even rough estimates such as this imply that sequenceable bone DNA fragments may still be present more than 1 Myr after deposition in deep frozen environments. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that future research may identify authentic DNA that is significantly older than the current record of approximately 450–800 kyr from Greenlandic ice cores. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.1745 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...