/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #11943150

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how long can proteins and nucleic acids be preserved

Anonymous Mon 27 Jul 17:17:23 2020 No.11943150 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11943245

Biology ignorant here. I was reading this:
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/7/4/815/5762999
And was wondering if anyone has any more up to date information or explanation for someone completely ignorant of biology.
Tldr: there are 75 million year old apparent DNA fragments reacting to DNA staining and they excluded microorganism contaminants (at least from what I understand).
I thought stuff like proteins or DNA lasted only a few thousand years at best.
Inb4 jurassic park retards. Serious answers pls

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 27 Jul 2020 17:45:40 No.11943245 Report

Quoted By: >>11943498

>>11943150
they.ve reconstructed proteins based off mineral microstructure

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 27 Jul 2020 18:51:17 No.11943498 Report

Quoted By: >>11943832

>>11943245
Right, but that doesn't explain the DNA staining correct? Is it probable that they just did it wrong?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 27 Jul 2020 20:25:53 No.11943832 Report

Quoted By:

>>11943498
some nucleotides are perhaps a little more stable under the right conditions.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 27 Jul 2020 22:23:10 No.11944253 Report

Quoted By:

Chemically a lot of things can last a lot of time. However in the case of structures that carry information like DNA or proteins (the sequence order) it's way more difficult to be preserved properly.
For example, DNA is so stable it doesn't really chemically reacts without water nearby, but it still fragments and thus it's very difficult to get the complete genome from a really old sample. However, if you do know how the genome should look like (or have a close match) you can search the fragments in those genomes.

In the case of proteins, these are all chains of ~aminoacids, give or take modifications. For collagen, there's three specific hydroxi- modifications in three different aminoacids, so if you look for the ratio in a sample and you find it matches it most probably had collagen. This sadly can be only used with very specific proteins you expect them to be there, like melanin in skin and feathers in dinosaur fossils and hemoglobin in blood tissue.

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