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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

I just don’t know if I can truly believe that dna half life number. What dna molecule type in what condition ? What temperature? What does a long dna strand degrade into? Citations will be appreciated.

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Nature

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555

Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dinos-dna-demise-...

The Royal Society

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...

Scitech Daily

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-calculate-that-dna-has-...

Thanks. Looks like the royal society link is the original work, but the nature editorial also mentions the same - it’s still possible we might have higher stability in other conditions (they only loooked at dna in bone samples). Not saying we will hold hope for dinosaur cloning, just that 521 years sounds too small.

DNA is stable, but still susceptible to hydrolysis. Water will eventually degrade it down to constitutive parts.

How about in amber then? How long might we expect DNA to remain intact perfectly encased in amber?

You won't find DNA that isn't in contact with a lot of water in nature, unless something actively extract the water.

The questions still seems reasonable? Maybe there exists some geological processes minerals deposits that absorbed moisture? Some kind of geothermal heating (although maybe that would just make steam permeate the surrounding area), an asteroid fragment from the Chicxulub impact that carried DNA into space??

Amber is heterogeneous in composition, but consists of several resinous bodies more or less soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. Amber is a macromolecule by free radical polymerization of several precursors in the labdane family, e.g. communic acid, cummunol, and biformene. These labdanes are diterpenes (C20H32) and trienes, equipping the organic skeleton with three alkene groups for polymerization. As amber matures over the years, more polymerization takes place as well as isomerization reactions, crosslinking and cyclization.

Wikipedia Amber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber

CAN YOU REALLY PULL A "JURASSIC PARK" AND EXTRACT DNA FROM BUGS FROZEN IN AMBER?

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/can-you-really-extract-dna-fr...

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