Re:Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber (2016)
by garmaine on Saturday December 09, 2017 @09:46PM
(#15889553)
To be fair, many of those processes are things that I would presume halt at some point in an isolated chemical environment.
Also, what kind of breakdown? If segments up to a certain sizer were stable, that would be enough to reconstruct a full genome of the sequencers were sensitive enough and the final segments long enough.
Re:Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber (2016)
by throwaway613834 on Saturday December 09, 2017 @06:02PM
(#15888700)
Thanks! I even clicked on the link and read every sentence that had "half" in it but didn't see anything... didn't expect it to be somewhere else in the introduction haha.
Re:Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber (2016)
by delecti on Saturday December 09, 2017 @08:41PM
(#15889295)
As a general rule, it's safe to assume every word in the abstract of a paper is significant.
Re:Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber (2016)
by throwaway613834 on Saturday December 09, 2017 @08:54PM
(#15889357)
> As a general rule, it's safe to assume every word in the abstract of a paper is significant.
...what? The sentence quote above was from the introduction, not the abstract. Nothing in the abstract answered my question of why a stable structure like that of DNA should undergo disintegration. (Did you read the abstract yourself?)
> DNA has limited chemical stability and decays without the enzymatic repair mechanisms of living cells [18]. Following cell death, nucleases start to cleave the DNA into fragments [19] and during decomposition, the DNA is digested by micro-organisms [18,20]. In determining long-term DNA decay, it is believed that hydrolysis of amino groups accelerates the loss of purine residues (depurination), resulting in strand cleavage [21,22]. This random DNA fragmentation generates a characteristic negative exponential correlation between DNA fragment length and number of molecules (figure 1a) [23,24,26,27].