4 ms·
You may be oversimplifying here. I can't speak to Eukaryotes, but Prokaryotes are routinely flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and then stored for years at -80. Ge
by bhickey 11y ago
You may be oversimplifying here. I can't speak to Eukaryotes, but Prokaryotes are routinely flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and then stored for years at -80. Gently thaw them out and they're happy to go on reproducing.
For the purposes of a drug test, your requirements are even looser. I don't see why you'd need or care about lysing your cells. A test is only going to be screening for small molecules, so destroying organelles and lysing cells should be largely irrelevant.
- friendzis 11y agoI'm no chemist/biologist by education (happen to touch the field from time to time) and I am oversimplifying, but the point I wanted to stress is that the delayed test results largely depend on what are you searching for: something that is unnatural to human body or something that is naturally occurring/produced by human body. And unless you have extremely highly controlled test procedures and account for any changes to specimen caused by the test process, including but not limited to storage, then well... you have a biased test. That's scientific testing 101. Yes, sometimes this bias can be safely ignored, but I'm of no competence to tell if drug testing positive/negative results differ by a margin large enough. AFAIK, even flash frozen and gently thawed prokaryotes do not have 100% survive rate and eukaryote survive rate is considerably lower. My comment revolves around the idea that biochemical reactions have pretty strict requirements on conditions for happening at all, while chemical reactions are much looser in this regard. Even 99.999% survivability calls for scientific research on structural/biochemical/chemical change prior to using such techniques for anything touching legal system with anything shorter than ten foot pole. IMHO. Happy to be corrected.