
Trapped in 99M-Year-Old Amber, a Beetle with Pilfered Pollen - dnetesn
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/beetle-amber-cycad.html
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namuol
> 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.

~~~
andrewflnr
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. :)

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neonate
[http://archive.is/Wdp3Z](http://archive.is/Wdp3Z)

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

~~~
GW150914
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
sissyFuss
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.

