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Comment by stenl | Hacker News Reader

You should drop synthetic DNA in it and then sample all nearby lakes and do PCR. Even aftera trillion-fold dilution it should be detectable. Would be cheap, easy and very likely to work. A cool weekend project for your kids!

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> You should drop synthetic DNA in it and then sample all nearby lakes

Sounds like the backstory for a Lake Placid or Piranha-style movie...

In a typically-HN thread full of armchair experts brainstorming obvious "why don't they try" ideas [1], this is a truly interesting idea that I bet the experts haven't considered. Also some good potential in the area of espionage, if it already isn't being done.

1. See also the Malaysian Airlines disappearance thread.

Having seen this crop up on reddit before, with no novel or technically plausible ideas suggested, I have to say, Hacker News delivers :)

This would not be permitted for any NIH funded lab, there are pretty strict rules about handling recombinant DNA. There might also be laws preventing this, I'm not sure.

Why is this so if the DNA isn't part of an organism?

I guess there is some risk in some circumstances that the DNA will affect organisms just by being present in their environment, without having been actively introduced into their cells?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_%28genetics%29

Pardon my ignorance on this - but wouldn't dropping Synthetic DNA into the water be polluting it in some form?

I imagine leaves / fish / spit / what have you fall into the water all the time.

Almost every living thing contains DNA (the possible exception being some viruses if you consider them living).

The article mentioned locals claiming to have pushed down a car one night ... No idea what volume of synthetic DNA would be sensible here, but I can imagine it'd mass less than a car.

The only synthetic part of it is the sequence - on a molecular level it's exactly the same as naturally-occurring DNA.

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