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Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#41

Post by koeng »

syntaxing wrote: post #3

This is a naive question...but let's just say we do have the DNA, is Jurrasic park possible with today's technology?! I remember reading that someone was trying to inseminate an elephant with mammoth sperm a couple years ago but failed. Not sure if it was because the sample was super old or it just doesn't work.

Possible? Yes. Practical? Not for 2-3 decades when DNA synthesis capacity gets good enough to synthesize full animal genomes. In terms of raw synthesis power, we do have the ability to synthesize billions of base pairs, but you're going to need other infrastructure around it.

Also, immune problems I don't think would be a huge issue, the adaptive immune system has been around for a while.

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#45

Post by Retric »

grecy wrote: post #37
aphextron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.

Alright, let's just pretend the DNA was somehow snap frozen or preserved to make it still useable. With today's technology could we create a creature from long ago with nothing more than it's DNA?

It would be a reasonable thing to attempt with today’s technology, but it would be a serious R&D project.

It’s harder the older the sample and vastly more difficult if few closely related species survive.

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#46

Post by credit_guy »

aphextron wrote: post #8
syntaxing wrote: post #3

This is a naive question...but let's just say we do have the DNA, is Jurrasic park possible with today's technology?! I remember reading that someone was trying to inseminate an elephant with mammoth sperm a couple years ago but failed. Not sure if it was because the sample was super old or it just doesn't work.

It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.

> DNA has a half life of ~500 years

DNA is not a radioactive material. It decays, but there's no absolute law like the radioactive decay, where the half life is the same for every microgram of the same substance everywhere in the world. The average half-life may be 500 years, but there can be situations where the DNA is exceptionally well preserved due to local circumstances. As a simple analogy: the average half life of a human settlement is, let's say 50 years. That means we should see absolutely no traces of human settlements older than 2000 years (40 half-lives). That is far from true.

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#47

Post by brobinson »

Baeocystin wrote: post #35
zabeltech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the DNA was frozen?

At these time scales, background radiation is the fundamental killer, and it is omnipresent in the environment. Using numbers taken from http://news.mit.edu/1994/safe-0105 for napkin-math: Average background dose/year: 500 millirem LD50 instantaneous exposure: 450000 millirem LD100 instantaneous exposure: 600000 millirem Radiation exposure of our dinoDNA sample: 65 million * 500 = 32.5 billion millirem. Obviously the…

Right, but even a small amount of water (and presumably, ice) is amazing at absorbing radiation. Wouldn't something buried in a few meters of ice or more be effectively insulated from radiation?

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#48

Post by nck4222 »

BrandonM wrote: post #28
aphextron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.

Bringing back mammoths based only on DNA seems to me to be akin to bringing back a New Yorker based only on DNA, thousands of years after NYC no longer exists. Even with perfect DNA, I think we underestimate the role that social structure and ecological momentum play in even the simplest of creatures. I think humans are the rule and not the exception when it comes to learning after birth. And that's not even getting…

This is explored in the book Jurassic Park, but was left out of the movie.

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#49

Post by burtonator »

tynpeddler wrote: post #15
roywiggins wrote: post #10

"At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read—broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence." So... what good does that do?

Homology studies. A DNA strand 17 bp long is pretty distinct. If a strand that long or longer was found, we would gain a lot of information about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs that we could never get from fossils. However, the article isn't clear about what they found. It says DNA, then it says there may not be a recoverable sequence. In that case nucleic acids would be a better term than DNA. Without more in…

There was a paper not long ago saying that the DNA half life is about 500k years or so and that most of the DNA would be degraded.

The issue I had with this is why can't we reassemble chunks of DNA like we can with a puzzle.

I'm certain specialized algorithms exist within DNA analysis for this reason. This isn't my field and there are already algorithms that exist on the top of my head that could solve this issue.

The main issue is that you'd have to find a LOT of DNA to build one complete strand and you wouldn't have one strand from one specific animal.

... but you'd have a rough picture.

Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found

#50

Post by thaumasiotes »

Retric wrote: post #45
grecy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, let's just pretend the DNA was somehow snap frozen or preserved to make it still useable. With today's technology could we create a creature from long ago with nothing more than it's DNA?

It would be a reasonable thing to attempt with today’s technology, but it would be a serious R&D project. It’s harder the older the sample and vastly more difficult if few closely related species survive.

> It would be a reasonable thing to attempt with today’s technology, but it would be a serious R&D project.

Dinosaurs have enough cultural prestige that it would make total sense to do it as a vanity project if the technology is there.

Similar to turning lead into gold -- there's enough cultural meaning built up around it that someone should do it before it really makes sense in a vacuum.

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