The oldest DNA ever found?
Genes ordered at your friendly Mr Gene’s store are as fresh as can be (a point of honour, of course!). That freshness, however, isn’t really the case with the “dirt DNA” that has been digged up by Danish biologist Eske Willerslev.
Willerslev, the head of the “Ancient DNA and Evolution” lab, is a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He likes to hang around in really barren landscapes. 1991, for example, he enjoyed collecting megafauna fossils in North Eastern Siberia, while later, he lived as a trapper among the local Yukagihr people for six-months. Since then, Willerslev again was on the roam in nice spots such as Western Greenland and Northern Canada, collecting ancient coprolites and sediment samples for DNA analyses.
Collecting coprolites and sediments at minus degrees – really nice activities, aren’t they? And, what for the world, did this professor believe to discover inside frozen faeces?
Well, the answer is quite simply ancient DNA. VERY ancient DNA. Inside Siberian permafrost the 36-year-old adventurer from Copenhagen discovered 300,000- to 400,000-year-old DNA of mammoths, bison and mosses.
In short: he discovered the most ancient DNA ever found on Earth by more than 200,000 years.
In 2007, a readable feature on Willerslev was published in Science.
Long ago, Willerslev had pioneered the “dirt DNA” field meaning “the extraction and cloning of plant and animal DNA from just a few grams of soil and ice” (read an interesting Science feature from 2003 on Willerslev’s startling discovery Ancient DNA Pulled From Soil and Willerslev’s original Science paper on the same topic).
Recently, Willerslev broke his own record for the oldest DNA ever recovered finding DNA traces that are possibly 800,000 years old (Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores …, DOI: 10.1126/science.1141758).
Btw, scientists always assumed DNA older than 100,000 years being analysable as science fiction (remember the scornful laughter on Jurassic Park!).
Willerslev doesn’t give a damn about such doom-mongering. He is already eyeing Antarctica where ice temperatures going down to -50°C may have kept DNA preserved longer than at any other place.
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