3 ms·

Sweet. Can we have Jurassic Park now? Why or why not?

• burke 18y ago
  Apparently finding a full intact DNA sample is "impossible"... but here's hoping. :)
  • ericb 18y ago
    What happens if you average over several non-intact samples and take the common denominator? Or layer the DNA over a descendant based on certain markers? Given enough damaged "files" and good diff tools, I feel like hacking together a working one would be possible. Can someone who knows more tell me what I'm missing?
    • ars 18y ago
      DNA is more complicated than that. I don't fully understand the process, but I believe it works like this: You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list. You chop the DNA into pieces and pattern match sections (fragments) against markers. Then you try to put fragments together by matching overlaps. But if you have sections that repeat, or have a lot of the same atom over and over, you can't directly read those. Usually when they say: "we published the DNA" they mean the "coding section" - those are the sections that can make proteins. But there is a lot more to DNA, non-coding, or junk DNA that can not be easily (or at all?) read. So for the comment above yours, I think what they have is fragments, but no overlapping sections, so that can't put it together into a whole. It's not like a file with gaps - it's random pieces of it, of random lengths, in a random order.
      • gravitycop 18y ago
        You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list. Discrete units of information on DNA strands are not atoms. They are nucleotides or base pairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair
        • ars 18y ago
          I know, I was just trying to keep things simple. Or, you can use the other definition of atom: indivisible part, and an atom of DNA is it's smallest building block :)