Trapped in 99M-Year-Old Amber, a Beetle with Pilfered Pollen | Hacker News Reader

Trapped in 99M-Year-Old Amber, a Beetle with Pilfered Pollen

nytimes.com

34 pointsdnetesn12 comments

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> Pilfered Pollen

> Bees and butterflies are praised for their pollination prowess.

> before they ever flirted with a flower, beetles were one of the world’s pre-eminent pollinators.

I'm pretty sure writers at the NY Times hold alliteration competitions.

If it takes you leagues longer to penetrate the prose, they elevate exposure and raise returns. ;- )

On the other hand, Pilfered Pollen is a great name for a rock band! :D

Perhaps if passing as pedestrian prose, a pair of prefix-sharing words might prompt praise. But at full force, falling short of four forecloses on a fulsome flight of fancy.

In other words, two in a row is barely trying. :)

True, they tend to thrive tackling those trivial tasks.

http://archive.is/Wdp3Z

/me wonders how many base pairs are still intact in that pollen. That would be one really nice heirloom seed to have.

It’s not exact, and depends a lot on conditions, but the half life of DNA is reportedly around 521 years. Maybe if it was frozen that would slow down considerably, but in this case I’d guess were at least 98 million years too late.

That's the whole point. Plant DNA tends to have large numbers of repetitions and that works out to redundancy. Think of it as 'RAID for DNA', you just might have an intact copy of short segments of remaining DNA. DNA degrades gracefully, not all at once and the 'half life' is for the whole (very long) molecule, not for individual base pairs or shorter segments. So some of it might still be recoverable, hence the question 'how much'.

See previous threads about ancient DNA.

RAID for DNA is a really good, intuitive analogy, thanks!

Well, I tend to think of the repititions in two ways, each with its own context. One is allele frequency, such that gaps of funtional utility are created with ineffective codons, to create timing effects and distance oriented partitioning of productive segments as enzymes crawl the unzipped, live genome.

The other is more about radiation hardening, and those are full, bulk duplicates of chromosome sets, like the hexaploid grain genome that was recently being discussed last week.

But I wonder when that sort of radiation hardening aspect was selected for? Millions of years ago? Billions of years ago? Or was it all just an accident, never selected for or even put to use? If we, as humans, only have a set from each parent, I’d estimate that bulk duplication doesn’t seem to offer real benefits in the radiation hardened sense, or everything would have more copies for billions of years.

I could not really believe the 521 year thing, so I had to look it up. Its 521 years for a 242 bp fragment (even nature news reports it like you though) which ends up at a degradation rate of 5.50 × 10–6 per year per base pair (and they estimate double that for nuclear DNA versus the mitochondrial DNA in the study).

Still much too short for anything in the million year range though.

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