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Re:Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670M aft... by wwwtyro on Monday July 31, 2023 @01:17PM (#36945819)
What does half-life mean in the context of DNA? One base pair corrupted / unrecoverable? Half of them?
Re:Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670M aft... by monocasa on Monday July 31, 2023 @01:26PM (#36945963)
Half of them. Which is still useful in biological samples that have billions of copies.
Re:Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670M aft... by amelius on Monday July 31, 2023 @01:27PM (#36945982)
Yeah, you can still assemble a genome even if strands are broken. In fact this is done all the time as the size of the strands going into DNA sequencers are often only 100s or maybe 1000s of basepairs.
Re:Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670M aft... by netcraft on Monday July 31, 2023 @01:25PM (#36945952)
half life generally means that within the time frame 50% of the material will have been destroyed or changed.

so it would mean that half of the dna might still be available after 1M years

Re:Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670M aft... by graycat on Monday July 31, 2023 @02:49PM (#36947127)
To be meaningful, half-life needs a Markov assumption, i.e., that the past and future are conditionally independent given the present. Or, more simply, at each instant, forget the past and for predicting the future use only the present.

Some interesting work in the many contexts where half-life works would be to say what the Markov property says about the mechanism of the decay or whatever are trying to predict in the context.