So I know some stuff about Deextinction that makes me feel like it’s unlikely but from doing some research I wasn’t really sure what the answer is.
I know with the wooly mammoth that they are working on they couldn’t actually find complete dna even with some solid samples in decent environmental conditions (frozen in the arctic) and they went extinct MUCH more recently than dinosaurs. They only got bits and pieces of it because it degrades too fast so now they are basically just designing a new animal that’s a hairy elephant with tusks.
This makes me think that dna just degrades too fast for us to find complete dna from that long ago. Based on what I was reading it seems like the whole getting dna from mosquitos in amber and stuff isn’t really possible.
Is it possible there is still Dino dna out there in the world that we just either havnt found or havnt figured out how to be able to access yet? Obviously there is always a possibility but I mean some type of science that could lead to that conclusion? Based on the wooly mammoth it seems like if we got some decent parts of dna we could bring back some alternate version of dinosaurs
In: Biology
[This environmental DNA](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05453-y) is, as far as I know, the oldest DNA that’s ever been sequenced, about 2 million years. From what i can tell, it survived because it was both frozen and adsorbed onto the surface of rocks. The stuff that was successfully sequenced was about, they say, 50bp long.
I work in genomics. Thankfully I don’t have to sequence ancient DNA, but I have a colleague who sequences butterflies from museum collections and I can tell you on his behalf – sequencing old DNA is incredibly hard to do. It’s short, a lot of it is single stranded, there are nicks, some of the bases are chemically changed, and you have almost nothing to work with.
Normally when you sequence something, you break it up into millions of tiny ~150-300bp pieces, make billions of copies of those pieces, and then put it through a machine that tells you which base it reads, and then a very clever person has to use a lot of complicated informatics to put those tiny pieces together into the right order according to a reference. It’s like a jigsaw made of billions of letters.
Working with ancient DNA is like having a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are the size of a mustard seed, the edges are all broken so you can’t tell what fits where, you lost the picture on the box, and you have to do the puzzle perfectly on the first try because no one sells that puzzle any more.
Past much further than a few million years, all you’ll have left is single nucleotides (if that!), and that’d be like trying to write War and Peace by throwing a sack full of individual letters on the ground.
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