Thursday, October 4, 2007

Jurassic Park ain't happening anytime soon

From my molecular biology book...pretty cool stuff:
Their strategy is to isolate dinosaur DNA, but not directly from dinosaur remains. Instead they find Jurassic-period blood-sucking insects that had feasted on blood and had then become mired in tree sap, which had turned to amber, entombing and preserving the insects.
So they figure out that since blood as white blood cells with DNA they could amplify the DNA using PCR (so since DNA is double stranded and the strands are the same facing opposite directions, you can copy it easily if you know the first couple of base pairs) and then you just stick the DNA into an egg, like how they made Dolly the sheep.

While the science technology exists for this to happen, it probably won't because...

1. PCR can only can copy one 1/100,000 at a time so piecing 100,000 genes together kinda sucks.
2. even if technology got better for PCR to do the whole genome...DNA is pretty unstable and breaks really easily so finding a whole unbroken chromosome is pretty much impossible.
3. PCR amplifies all DNA so contaminate DNA from the mosquito might be replicated too making this weird dinosaur-mosquito thingy which would just be weird.

so tough luck on dinosaurs...... for now


No comments:

 

poligrip lawsuit