Re:Ancient Viruses Buried in DNA
by truxus on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:02PM
(#15421849)
Does your DNA change day to day?
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According to Wikipedia, "In human cells, both normal metabolic activities and environmental factors such as radiation can cause DNA damage, resulting in as many as 1 million individual molecular lesions per cell per day."
There are mechanisms to repair this damage, but they don't always work. Sometimes the result is cancer.
Your DNA is like a datacenter with a billion nodes that all start out with the same content in DRAM. Although error correction can compensate for most bit flips, at this scale you still get a really low mean time between failures, leading to differing memory contents over time.
Re:Ancient Viruses Buried in DNA
by pazimzadeh on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:22PM
(#15422112)
An excerpt from my genetics professor:
"Even in the absence of mutagens, an average gene will mutate about once in a million generations. ~10^16 cell divisions occur in a typical life span so somewhere in cells that are part of you each of your genes has mutated 10^10 times (hence cancer)."