dino news: mummified dinosaur tail found in amber. Has ACTUAL 3D FEATHERY FEATHERS - by Vivian
faetal on 14/12/2016 at 19:14
Quote Posted by Vivian
For mammoths and stuff, I dunno - it's an interesting idea, and part of me thinks why not? But I'm dubious, there's loads of epigenetic stuff you'd miss... this is more neontology stuff really - Faetal, what's take?
With current tech, it doesn't seem doable. The DNA instability is really a big problem. As you say, things like DNA methylation / histone acetylation patterns are also likely to end up being knacked over time too. I guess if there was something prevalent enough where you had enough overlapping sequences to statistically identify errors, then maybe. It's tempting to think you have a proper snapshot when you see something so nicely preserved as body parts or whole insects in amber, but a great deal of macro structure is accounted for by slow-degrading proteins, so it's possible to get something which looks the business but is a molecular mess. I can't go into too much detail, but the sheer amount of bioinformatics analysis which the BIs where I work have to do just to ensure that knocking out a gene won't fuck up the splicing regulation for the entire region or mess with adjacent or overlapping mis-sense genes etc.. is pretty staggering. I'm thinking putting back together a genome with little to no reference material to correct against and avoiding some pretty funky dysregulation issues is a task so big I can't even see it. If the tech changes though, or we find something unexpected and well-preserved, then I don't see why not eventually. The question is who will pay for it.
SubJeff on 14/12/2016 at 22:21
Oh, people would pay. If there was a realistic possibility of getting a full sequence people would pay.
Can you tell which parts of the DNA structure are unstable/degraded or is it all completely unreadable?
Vivian on 14/12/2016 at 22:32
So best guess at the moment is that DNA has a half-life of 521 years, which means that after 7 million years or so it would basically be soup, even if it was perfectly preserved (bit of a pile of sand vs. sandcastle sort of vibe): (
http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555)
Even with that as a max limit, how much breakdown do you need before the absolute best you can do is make a big ball of retarded dino-cancer? How much degradation of human DNA is incompatible with life?
SubJeff on 14/12/2016 at 22:55
If any of it were useful, and you could tell the difference between real code and soup, you'd just need to sequence loads of it and jigsaw it.
You only need a small amount of DNA degradation for incompatibility with life; I was thinking about assembling a proper full sequence.
Vivian on 14/12/2016 at 23:08
From the sound of it, there's absolutely no way you'd get even partial sequences of DNA from a non-avian dinosaur. Youd just have to make it up based on indirect evidence like skeletal anatomy etc, which is what the chicken mutant thing is supposed to be doing.
Tocky on 15/12/2016 at 03:25
So cold weather brought flight. Our envy of it brought our own. Does that mean no flight by creatures on warm planets? No plane development then rocket to visit elsewhere? Only rockets were a development of wanting to kill something far away so as long as other creatures want long range kills they could still develop them on warm planets. Ergo stay away from creatures from hot worlds come for a visit. Naturally I'm being facetious. All the speculation does bring out info though. Thanks for that.
Sigh. Sad that we will never know the full historical rendering of evolution. Not that we would have long enough a life to view it even one frame per development anyway. And if we want to make Godzilla to eat a city we will just have to make the entire thing up from chicken bones.
Queue on 15/12/2016 at 07:16
Enough of this discourse. You all know that God put those feathers there to fool us. FOOL US, I SAY!
faetal on 15/12/2016 at 12:50
Quote Posted by Tocky
So cold weather brought flight.
Only if you ignore non-avians which can fly. Convergent evolution and that.
